Posts Tagged Montana
The Court – Citizens United – NYTimes.com
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Congress, Politics on June 26, 2012
Citizens United
Published: June 25, 2012
The Supreme Court examined the Arizona immigration law in minute detail, but when it came to revisiting the damage caused by its own handiwork in the 2010 Citizens United case, it couldn’t be bothered. In a single dismissive paragraph on Monday, the court’s conservative majority refused to allow Montana or any other state to impose limits on corporate election spending and wouldn’t even entertain arguments on the subject.
It is not as if those five justices could be unaware of the effects of Citizens United, and of the various court and administrative decisions that followed it. They could hardly have missed the $300 million in outside spending that deluged the 2010 Congressional elections or the reports showing that more than $1 billion will be spent by outside groups on Republican candidates this year, overwhelming the competition.
They might also have seen that many of the biggest donations are secret, given to tax-free advocacy groups in defiance even of the admonition in Citizens United that independent contributions should be disclosed.
If the justices were at all concerned about these developments, they could have used the Montana case to revisit their decision and rein in its disastrous effects. The only conclusion is that they are quite content with the way things worked out.
The court’s five conservative justices struck down a Montana law that prohibited corporate spending in elections — a law passed in 1912 not out of some theoretical concern about money corrupting elections but to put an end to actual influence-buying by copper barons.
State officials told the court that fighting corruption required them to maintain limits on corporate election spending. A series of friend-of-the-court briefs urged the justices to allow other states to impose similar laws, citing the out-of-control spending unleashed since 2010.
Those pleas were summarily rejected by the court’s majority, which refused to hear arguments on the issue. “There can be no serious doubt” that Citizens United applies to Montana, the court said.
That’s true, in the literal sense that Supreme Court decisions apply to the states. But the frustration of the dissenters, led by Justice Stephen Breyer, was clear. He said grave doubt had been cast on the majority’s belief, expressed in Citizens United, that independent expenditures do not give rise to corruption or even give the appearance of corruption. But he said the majority had made it plain that it hasn’t the slightest interest in reconsidering or altering its decision.
Congress can — and should — require disclosure of secret donations. The Internal Revenue Service should crack down on political organizations that pose as tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations to avoid current disclosure rules.
But, for now, the nation’s highest court has chosen to turn its back as elections are bought by the biggest check writers.
The Court – Citizens United – NYTimes.com.
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- High court affirms corporations’ right to political spending (nbcpolitics.msnbc.msn.com)
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How Right-Wingers on the Supreme Court Sold Our Democracy Down the River — Again | | AlterNet
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Supreme Court on June 26, 2012
AlterNet / By Steven Rosenfeld
How Right-Wingers on the Supreme Court Sold Our Democracy Down the River — Again
The Court’s right-wing majority refused to look at facts that showed how it erred in its 2010 Citizens United ruling.
June 25, 2012
When the gavel fell in the U.S. Supreme Court’s chamber after the justices overturned Montana’s century-old ban on corporate electioneering on Monday, it drove another nail into the coffin of American democracy.
Of course, America’s campaign finance laws have been riddled with loopholes for years. What’s new and scary is the emerging audacity and overt politicization of the Supreme Court.
Taken narrowly, the 5-4 ruling, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock, affirmed the rights of corporations to participate in Montana elections by overturning a 1912 ban that top Montana political leaders and judges said was needed to keep the Big Sky State’s low-cost elections free from undue influence by wealthy interests.
“Montana’s arguments… were already rejected in Citizens United or fail to meaningfully distinguish the case,” the Supreme Court majority’s one-page ruling said.
More broadly, the Court’s right-wing majority reaffirmed the controversial 2010 ruling with impunity. By not revisiting any aspect of Citizens United, they declared that new facts upending the decision did not matter. Nor would they admit that they had erred on key points in Citizens United, or that public outcry over the ruling meant much, or that major loopholes unleashed by Citizens United – and follow-up court rulings – were relevant.
“Were it up to me, I would vote to… reconsiderCitizens United or, at least, its application in this case,” wrote Justice Stephen Breyer, in a short dissent agreed to by justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan. “But given the Court’s per curiam [majority] disposition, I do not see a significant possibility of reconsideration.”
The refusal to revisit Citizens United will likely reverberate in political circles for years.
Today’s biggest campaign finance loopholes—those that allow shadow groups known as super PACs that can take multi-million-dollar donations and run the nastiest political ads, all while pretending that they aren’t coordinating their actions with candidates—are now going to become an anti-democratic fixture on the American political landscape.
What does it mean when the Court’s ruling majority cannot look at new facts objectively, cannot admit that they erred, and cannot review aspects of a recent decision despite calls to do so from the country’s best legal minds, top federal elected officials, majorities of voters asked in numerous nationwide polls, and four associate Court justices? It means, as political analyst James Fallows wrotethis weekend in the Atlantic, that most reasonable observers would conclude that the United States was experiencing “a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.”
Who is leading this putative coup led by the Supreme Court’s conservatives?
The answer is the Republican Party, as the beneficiary of most of 2012’s big-dollar loopholes and whose officials have filed most of the lawsuits that have resulted in the ongoing deregulation of campaign finance laws. Also winning big are a handful of the richest Americans, typically old men whose multi-million-dollar political gifts barely dent their vast family fortunes. And it is also major corporate players, who, emboldened by Citizens United—and federal failures to enforce most campaign finance laws—have flocked to newly politicized non-profits that can spend millions on political advertising but don’t have to disclose their donors’ identities.
Lost in the deregulatory melee are the voices of ordinary Americans.
“The current situation, wrought by Citizens United, is nothing short of a gross debasement of our democracy and the idea of one citizen, one vote,” said Paul S. Ryan, senior council for the Campaign Legal Center, who filed a brief urging the Court to revisit the 2010 ruling. “In theory the decision is naïve. In practice it is shameful.”
“The Supreme Court continues to deny reality when it comes to assessing the impact of independent spending on elections,” said Public Citizen president Robert Weissman, in a statement that typified the reaction from campaign reform advocates. “The Court is not going to overturn Citizens United, at least in the near term. It thus falls on the people to overturn the Court, through a constitutional amendment.”
Weissman and other amendment proponents omit another possibility: that the best way to counter a runaway Supreme Court in the short term would be electing a president that would appoint a fairer minded federal judiciary, starting at the Supreme Court. Three justices, two conservatives and one liberal, are now in their mid-70s and approaching retirement.
A Nation of Men, Not Laws
The scariest aspect of the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is their self-satisfying radicalism. They are anything but conservative jurists — true judicial conservatives would hold facts in higher regard than their ideological beliefs and partisan leanings.
One of fundamental precepts of American democracy is that there is a difference between the “rule of law” and the “rule of men.” The judicial process is based on establishing the facts in court and having judges interpret the laws in a fair-minded if not skeptical manner.
The problem with the Citizens United ruling, and indeed with Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 campaign finance ruling that ushered in today’s big money-dominated elections, is that key elements of both these decisions were not based on the facts. They were based on the beliefs of justices in the majority about what they wanted the facts to be.
In Buckley, the Court looked at a new law passed by Congress that limited campaign donations and campaign spending. It wanted to rush out a decision well before the 1976 presidential election, but didn’t have a factual record about how the new contribution and spending limits would work, according to Burt Neuborne, who was involved in the case and is now legal director of the Brennan Center at NYU Law School.
So the Court asked both sides to negotiate a settlement—and that’s why that decision reads like a scholarly article, not a court case. Law professors citeBuckley as exactly what courts are not supposed to do procedurally. Yet it laid the foundation for today’s campaigns—and was the most defining campaign finance ruling until Citizens United.
Buckley unleashed a political demon. It ruled that individuals could spend unlimited amounts on their own in a political campaign. The justices held that the only reason to limit such spending was to prevent corruption, but concluded that individuals could not corrupt themselves. For years, campaign consultants and election lawyers followed this logic—and the way it was applied by judges—and created fictitious political committees that were supposedly unconnected to candidates and thus exempt from regulation. Thus, monied interests came to monopolize the airwaves and stifle electoral debate.
Over the years, campaign finance reformers have waged a number of legal battles with loophole-embracing lawyers and have only won a few—mostly to preserve campaign contribution limits, donation disclosure laws, public financing schemes, and the long-established precedent that prevented corporations from spending freely in elections.
The corporate ban fell with the 2010 Citizens United decision. In it, the Supreme Court said that corporations and unions could make unlimited donations to non-candidate political committees—so-called “independent expenditures.”
It also said that because these committees called themselves independent, they were independent and were exempt from regulation. And they said that independent political committees could not be corrupted, and that political corruption had to be close to bribery—and not just create an appearance of impropriety.
Another federal court decision that quickly followed Citizens United tied these threads together and unleashed 2012’s super PACS, in which former aids to various presidential candidates (mostly on the GOP side of the aisle) created these groups, started taking multi-million-dollar donations, and used the money for ads backing their ex-bosses.
These loopholes were unmasked and reported on by major media organizations. This record of multi-million-dollar gifts by donors who were then seen meeting with specific candidates, as well as the record of independent groups that ran negative ads that were a counterpoint to the candidate’s positive ads, were some of the “facts” that prompted many people—editorial boards, advocates, elected officials, and associate Supreme Court justices—to ask the Court’s majority to revisitCitizens United.
When in late 2011 the Montana Supreme Court upheld its century-old ban on corporate electioneering, it was widely seen as a challenge to Citizens United—because under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, state courts have to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings. The Montana Supreme Court said that Montana had a unique political history, and had all kinds of legal reasons to uphold its 1912 ban on corporate electioneering.
Most election law scholars believed that Montana would be overruled, but they also held out hope that the U.S. Supreme Court would rehear aspects of Citizens United, because the decision’s claims that independent political committees—like super PACs—were in fact independent had proven to be false in 2012. Moreover, they held out hope that the 2010 ruling’s declarations that independent expenditure groups could not be corrupted would also be re-examined. That appeared to the very kind of conflict of interest Buckley said could be regulated—but which Citizens United said was not a problem.
Two Supreme Court justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, issued a short statement when the Court took the Montana case, saying they hoped their colleagues would use the case to revisit these aspects of Citizens United. A variety of legal briefs were filed arguing the same thing. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said wealthy interests were using the threat of outsized donations to super PACs to threaten elected officials—giving another real-life example of Citizen United’s anti-democratic impact.
Former top American Civil Liberties Union officials, who broke with the group’s fundamentalist First Amendment stance, wrote a brief reminding Citizen United’s main author, Justice Anthony Kennedy, of his prior decisions holding that not all corporations were treated equally for First Amendment purposes.
None of these arguments swayed the Court’s right-wing ideologues.
“Montana’s experience, like considerable experience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so,” Justice Breyer wrote in his dissent.
Campaign finance reformers pledged to keep fighting in the wake of Monday’s ruling. Many states across the country, including Montana, are looking at ballot measures calling on Congress to send a constitutional amendment to the states that would return the power to control campaign finances to Congress.
But there is no getting around the bottom line. The Montana ruling at the Supreme Court is a dark day for American democracy. The Court only makes campaign finance rulings periodically and often decades apart. In the meantime, the special interests and people with the deepest pockets have new power to dominate and distort all stages of the democratic process—from elections to lobbying.
Whether the solution is a constitutional amendment or electing a president who will not appoint ideologues to the court is an open question. What is clear is that American democracy is certainly weakened and possibly imperiled when the highest court deliberately chooses to ignore facts and consequences that impact how the public elects its representative government.
How Right-Wingers on the Supreme Court Sold Our Democracy Down the River — Again | | AlterNet.
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Montana attempts to buck the Supreme Court on Citizens United – The Washington Post
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Money, Politics on May 31, 2012
Montana bucks the court
By ,
At issue is the court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which held, unremarkably, that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they come together in corporate entities or labor unions to speak collectively. What do liberals consider the constitutional basis for saying otherwise?
Three Montana corporations sued to bring the state into conformity with Citizens United by overturning a 100-year-old state law, passed when copper and other corporations supposedly held sway, that bans all corporate political spending. The state’s Supreme Court refused to do this, citing Montana’s supposedly unique susceptibility to corporate domination — an idea amusingly discordant with the three corporations’ failure even to persuade the state court to acknowledge the supremacy of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Reasons for the Supreme Court to reconsider Citizens United are nonexistent. The ruling’s primary effect has been to give unions and incorporated nonprofit advocacy groups freedom to spend what they choose on political speech as long as they do not coordinate with candidates or campaigns. Campaign “reformers,” who advocate speech rationing, apparently regard evidence irrelevant to argument, probably because there is no evidence for their assertion that 2012 has been dominated by corporate money unleashed by Citizens United. An amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court by Sen. Mitch McConnell, Congress’s staunchest defender of the First Amendment, notes:
Through March 31, the eight leading super PACs supporting Republican presidential candidates received contributions totaling $96,410,614. Of this, $83,220,167 (86.32 percent) came from individuals, only $13,190,447 (13.68 percent) from corporations, and only 0.81 percent from public companies. McConnell says, “Not a single one of the Fortune 100 companies has contributed a cent” to any of the eight super PACS. These facts refute such prophesied nightmares as The Post’s fear that corporate money “may now overwhelm” individuals’ contributions.
Even an article in the ABA Journal falsely says: “These multimillion-dollar PACs were made possible by” Citizens United. And Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented in that decision, say that the Montana case gives the court an occasion to reconsider it “in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance.” Disregard the unsupported smear that candidates are bought, but note this: If these justices believe candidates are corrupted by independent expenditures, presumably they believe that regulating or outlawing them can be justified as combating corruption or the “appearance” thereof. Hence their objection is not to Citizens United but to constitutional protection of advocacy-funding practices that are as old as the Republic.
Before Citizens United removed restrictions on independent expenditures by for-profit corporations, a majority of states already had no such restrictions. Neither did they have records of distinctively bad behavior.
Indisputably, this year’s super PACs have, as McConnell’s brief says, “led to more political debate over a lengthier period of time during which more voters had the opportunity to participate in the choice of a presidential candidate.” As McConnell notes, the Montana court’s ruling is “disdainful” and disobedient regarding the Citizens United decision, but this lawlessness is not what bothers many people who think of themselves as defenders of good government. Instead, much of the media and most liberals urge Americans to be scandalized about “too much money” in politics. That three-word trope means (because most political money is spent on the dissemination of political advocacy) that there is more political speech by others than is considered proper by much of the media, which are unrestricted advocates.
This media and liberal anxiety was not conspicuous in 2004, when George Soros spent $24 million supporting Democratic candidates. Back then, the liberal/media complex embraced this Supreme Court principle enunciated in 1976: “The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”
Last year, Procter & Gamble, America’s largest advertiser, spent $2,949,100,000 — more than will be spent by the Obama and Romney campaigns and super PACs supporting them. The fact that more is spent to influence Americans’ choice of their detergent than of their president is as interesting as this:
The collapse of liberals’ confidence in their ability to persuade is apparent in their concentration on rigging the rules of political persuasion. Their problem is that the First Amendment is the rule.
Montana attempts to buck the Supreme Court on Citizens United – The Washington Post.
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The Associated Press: TSA defends pat-down of 4-year-old at Kan. airport
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in WTF on April 26, 2012
TSA defends pat-down of 4-year-old at Kan. airport
By ROXANA HEGEMAN, Associated Press
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The grandmother of a 4-year-old girl who became hysterical during a security screening at a Kansas airport said Wednesday that the child was forced to undergo a pat-down after hugging her, with security agents yelling and calling the crying girl an uncooperative suspect.
The incident has been garnering increasing media and online attention since the child’s mother, Michelle Brademeyer of Montana, detailed the ordeal in a public Facebook post last week. The Transportation Security Administration is defending its agents, despite new procedures aimed at reducing pat-downs of children.
The child’s grandmother, Lori Croft, told The Associated Press that Brademeyer and her daughter, Isabella, initially passed through security at the Wichita airport without incident. The girl then ran over to briefly hug Croft, who was awaiting a pat-down after tripping the alarm, and that’s when TSA agents insisted the girl undergo a physical pat-down.
Isabella had just learned about “stranger danger” at school, her grandmother said, adding that the girl was afraid and unsure about what was going on.
“She started to cry, saying ‘No I don’t want to,’ and when we tried talking to her she ran,” Croft said. “They yelled, ‘We are going to shut down the airport if you don’t grab her.’”
But she said the family’s main concern was the lack of understanding from TSA agents that they were dealing with a 4-year-old child, not a terror suspect.
“There was no common sense and there was no compassion,” Croft said. “That was our biggest fault with the whole thing — not that they are following security procedures, because I understand that they have to do that.”
Brademeyer, of Missoula, Mont., wrote a public Facebook post last week about the April 15 incident, claiming TSA treated her daughter “no better than if she had been a terrorist.” The posting was taken down Wednesday. Another post said the family had filed formal complaints with the TSA and the airport.
The TSA released a statement Tuesday saying it explained to the family why additional security procedures were necessary and that agents didn’t suspect or suggest the child was carrying a firearm.
“TSA has reviewed the incident and determined that our officers followed proper screening procedures in conducting a modified pat-down on the child,” the agency said.
The statement noted that the agency recently implemented modified screening procedures for children age 12 and younger to further reduce the need for pat-downs of children, such as multiple passes through a metal detector and advanced imaging technology.
“These changes in protocol will ultimately reduce — though not eliminate — pat-downs of children,” the statement said. “In this case, however, the child had completed screening but had contact with another member of her family who had not completed the screening process.”
U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, pressed the TSA for more information Wednesday. Tester, a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said he was concerned the TSA went too far.
“I am a staunch advocate for effective transportation security, but I’m also a strong advocate for common sense and the freedoms we enjoy as Americans,” Tester wrote to TSA Administrator John Pistole. “Any report of abuse of the power entrusted to officers of the TSA is especially concerning — especially if it involves children.”
In a phone interview from her home in Fountain Valley, Calif., Croft said Brademeyer tried to no avail to get TSA agents to use a wand on the frightened girl or allow her to walk through the metal detector again. She also said TSA agents wanted to screen her granddaughter alone in a separate room.
“She was kicking and screaming and fighting and in hysterics,” Croft said. “At that point my daughter ran up to her against TSA’s orders because she said, ‘My daughter is terrified, I can’t leave her.’”
The incident went on for maybe 10 minutes, until a manager came in and allowed agents to pat the girl down while she was screaming but being held by her mother. The family was then allowed to go to their next gate with a TSA agent following them.
Croft said that for the first few nights after coming home, Isabelle had nightmares and talked about kidnappers. She said TSA agents had shouted at the girl, telling her to calm down and saying the suspect wasn’t cooperating.
“To a 4-year-old’s perspective that’s what it was to her because they didn’t explain anything and she did not know what was going on,” Croft said. “She saw people grabbing at her and raising their voices. To her, someone was trying to kidnap her or harm her in some way.”
The Associated Press: TSA defends pat-down of 4-year-old at Kan. airport.
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