To Top It Off

Carrying on this proud micro-trend of ripping posts from TPM, I just wanted to make sure everyone saw this development before it gets completely overshadowed by healthcare's umpteenth round of horrendously unsatisfying hand-wringing:

In a ruling that has major implications for how elections are funded, the Supreme Court has struck down a key campaign-finance restriction that bars corporations and unions from pouring money into political ads.

The long-awaited 5-4 ruling, in the Citizens United v. FEC case, presents advocates of regulation with a major challenge in limiting the flow of corporate money into campaigns, and potentially opens the door for unrestricted amounts of corporate money to flow into American politics.

In the case at issue, Citizens United (CU), a conservative advocacy group, was challenging a ruling by the FEC that barred it from airing a negative movie about Hillary Clinton. CU received corporate donations and the movie advocated the defeat of a political candidate within 60 days of an election. CU argued that the FEC ruling violated its freedom of speech, and that the relevant provision of McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional.

The court overruled a 1990 decision that found that government can stop corporations from spending money on ads that urge the election or defeat of a candidate. It's rare for the Supreme Court to overturn a precedent arrived at so recently.

A bit further down, the article carries the following block quote from the majority opinion:

Distinguishing wealthy individuals from corporations based on the latter's special advantages of e.g., limited liability, does not suffice to allow laws prohibiting speech. It is irrelevant for First Amendment purposes that corporate funds may "have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas." Austin, supra, at 660. All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech.

Which is to say, distinguishing a living breathing human being from a legal entity that we have long since collectively decided ought to enjoy the civil rights of a mortal citizen does not suffice to prohibit the latter from drowning any candidate to the left of Richard Nixon with dollar-sign embossed cloth bags of gold. But don't worry, you on the other side will always have the economic might of the unions behind you.

As much as it pains me to write it, with this Court, I wouldn't hold out much hope for that Leftist-wave, Lion.