Hurry Up and Wait.

[elleng]

by Linda Greenhouse

But I also believe that the First Amendment doesn’t require resigning ourselves to seeing democracy auctioned off to the highest bidder. It is, in other words, an exquisitely tough issue, made no simpler by decades of inconsistent Supreme Court decisions that have produced legal doctrine so muddled as to be “beyond incoherence,” in the words of Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

In placing two major recent precedents in question and setting off a mid-summer scramble to file supplemental briefs and prepare for an unnecessarily expedited argument, the court cheated the public of the full airing that the complex questions merit. Just as important, the court cheated itself with a power play that prized haste over the calm deliberation that would seem to offer the only path to finding common ground on a polarized court.

Now it appears that the chief justice and his allies may have overreached. With 37 cases argued so far this term, the court left town having decided a scant four. There is some speculation that a prolonged internal struggle over how far to go in Citizens United has sucked the air out of the term. The court’s silence, of course, proves only that it had nothing ready for prime time. Perhaps a tactical retreat to minimalism is in the offing, as happened last term, when the court’s conservatives teed up a constitutional evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, only to back down in the end.

I may not be sure what I think about how to regulate money in politics, but I’m confident of this prediction: that no matter how the court rules, it will not fix the old problems and — if the past is any guide — just might create new ones.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/hurry-up-and-wait/?th&emc=th

[Goldstein1984]

1. Great post, elleng. We've not paid much attention to SCOTUS

I wonder in the Supreme Court is avoiding the decision because they sense the fury that will be released if they decide that a corporation is indeed a person?

We the people are getting tired of their predictable 5-4 conservative decisions.

They know they're too old to outrun a mob.