Returning to the Root of Our Corruption

The Supreme Court in the Citizens United Decision Opened the Door Wide for Money to Corrupt our Elections and Trump walked right in

It was hard to miss that awful photo of the world’s economic titans sitting in the front row of Trump’s indoor inauguration show. Worth according to Forbes a collective $1.35 trillion—that is four of the five richest men in the world—attended the inauguration of President Donald Trump. When historians look back on this wild era in our history—they might surely start there—and work their way backwards to the time when monied interests started not just to influence our politics but to own them. The road to that new ‘meritocracy’ we witnessed this January 6, four years after Trump moved to overthrow the legitimate government was paved by the Supreme Court, particularly by one of the most wrongly decided in their long ignominious history, Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission. Future historians would quickly recognize that this obscenity was made possible by this one 2010 Supreme Court decision. Looking back on what transpired following this bad even immoral decision it might seem like Obama should have been much tougher in insisting on getting his Supreme Court pick a hearing and Biden should have gone through with his threat to drastically reform the court —those were possibly the two last chances we had in a generation to turn back the Trump succession after the same Roberts court granted Trump presidential immunity from virtually all crimes.

According to Wikipedia “the Court held in a 5-4 decision that laws restricting the political spending of corporations and unions are inconsistent with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme court—Justice Kennedy in particular who was writing for the majority rejected precedent (a not so sacred cow any more for the Court) by arguing against the ruling in the 1990 case Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which had held that a state law that prohibited corporations from using money to support or oppose candidates in elections did not violate the Constitution. In also overturning the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), which had placed restrictions on corporate and union spending in federal elections, particularly on "electioneering communications" (broadcast ads mentioning a candidate within a certain time frame before an election) the court opened the flood gates to dark money and Super PACS—basically unlimited money that could be supplied by billionaires such as the billionaires who were the first time invited to a presidential inauguration that they had literally bought and paid for. The Republican party became irrelevant not just because it was bankrupt for ideas and had been for decades but also because it was no longer an important fundraising vehicle.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Citizens United one the Court’s worst mistakes, saying that “the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be. Justice Stevens in a 90 page dissent (the longest of his career) corrected Kennedy’s errors that corporations possessed the same free speech rights as humans and how the founders “Unlike our colleagues..had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.” Stevens futher thundered “At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt,” he wrote. “It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Trump’s elevator ride was oiled by Kennedy’s total misreading of the Constitution. It was the green light that corporate America needed to perform their state capture. Just find the right candidate who luxuriated in transactional politics, who knew how to silence or at least threaten critics and who lacked any moral compass. It just took a few years but Trump became the answer to all their corrupt prayers. Meanwhile Elon Musk had been waiting in the wings to do what the other billionaires felt might be going a bridge too far—- become a full blown Trump surrogate. Spending a fraction of his fortune to make sure he could have a seat in government —he became MAGA’s most ardent wingman and heat shield. Musk could only have completed this corrupt scheme because of the Citizens decision had turned a blind eye to quid pro quo schemes that Stevens had noted in his dissent were now allowed by the majority. Stevens worst nightmare was coming true. The richest man in the world was given carte blanche to run government into the ground by randomly firing federal workers and continuing to collect funds from the feds for his various companies while admitting to no conflict of interest. It is now our nightmare and our only escape would be a complete reform of the Supreme Court—but the open question now is the system now too corrupt to reform itself. Since the Citizen’s decision the rot may have settled in too deeply for any hope of rescue.