Argument preview: Corporations in politics

[usregimechange]

Looking back on the Gilded Age, historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager wrote: “The nation was fabulously rich but its wealth was gravitating rapidly into the hands of a small portion of the population, and the power of wealth threatened to undermine the political integrity of the Republic.” Justice Felix Frankfurter quoted that remark in a 1957 decision, and recalled that in the late 19th Century, there had been a “popular feeling that aggregated capital unduly influenced politics, an influence not stopping short of corruption.”

For generations, that image of the Gilded Age has shadowed the American business corporation, with popular rhetoric routinely treating corporate money, when used in politics, as corrupt and corrupting. Now, more than a century later, the Supreme Court is confronting the question — as much a cultural as a constitutional inquiry – of whether that perception is out of date. It is pondering whether corporations ought to enjoy full constitutional equality in the financing of modern campaigns for the Presidency and for Congress. It is doing so in a case that started out a lot more modestly than that, the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Background

Historians and legal scholars disagree on what led Congress, in 1907, to pass the Tillman Act, the first federal campaign finance law, banning American corporations from donating money directly to candidates in federal elections. Some say it was done as a matter of political reform, to curb the growing power of corporations in politics — that is, the capacity of Big Business to “buy” influence, a reality demonstrated back then by what was known as the New York Life Insurance scandals over secret corporate donations to Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign in 1904...

Assuming that Sotomayor does side with the Stevens bloc, that group definitely needs to rely heavily upon arguments for judicial modesty or ”minimalism,” arguments that might stir some hesitation in Justice Kennedy, or perhaps even in the Chief Justice or Justice Alito.

More here:
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/argument-preview-corporations-in-politics/


Good read.

[pscot]

1. In the words of the immortal Han Solo

I got a bad feeling about this.