The Real Radicals
by tristero
“They have more or less given up on defeating [Sotomayor], so they are going to engage in a framing exercise,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview. “They’re trying to define a Republican worldview imported into the judiciary as the judicial norm for the country.”
The goal, Whitehouse added, “is to define the political ideology” of the new conservative judiciary as “representing the mainstream and to tarnish any judges who are outside that mark.”
Then Dionne provides an example of genuinely radical judicial activism:
The justices had before them a simple case, involving a group called Citizens United, that could have been disposed of on narrow grounds. The organization had asked to be exempt from the restrictions embodied in the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law for a movie critical of Hillary Clinton that it produced during last year’s presidential campaign. Citizens United says it should not have to disclose who paid for the film.
Rather than decide the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable exercise of judicial overreach. It postponed its decision, called for new briefs and scheduled a hearing this September on the broader question of whether corporations should be allowed to spend money to elect or defeat particular candidates.
What the court was saying was that it wanted to revisit a 19-year-old precedent that barred such corporate interference in the electoral process. That 1990 ruling upheld what has been the law of the land since 1947, when the Taft-Hartley Act banned independent expenditures by both corporations and labor unions.
To get a sense of just how extreme (and, yes, activist) such an approach would be, consider that laws restricting corporate activity in elections go all the way back to the Tillman Act of 1907, which prohibited corporations from giving directly to political campaigns.
It is truly frightening that a conservative Supreme Court is seriously considering overturning a century-old tradition at the very moment the financial crisis has brought home the terrible effects of excessive corporate influence on politics.
Yup.