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Grumbling
over the Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens United
continue to rumble like distant thunder. Will the decision go
down in history as one more in the Court's long line of
egregious opinions? Likely! Will it have much effect on the
American political landscape? Likely not! Simply ask yourself,
how much worse can it get?
There is
scant evidence that the Congressional attempts to limit
corporate expenditures in electioneering have had any effect in
reducing corporate influence in government. Expecting the
Congress, most if not all of whose members reside deep in
corporate pockets, to eliminate that influence can be likened to
expecting the rhinovirus to eliminate the common cold. Corporate
money is the diseased life-blood of American politics; it
carries its cancerous spores to all extremities.
The
Supreme Court really should be named the Unbeseem Court. Without
any Constitutional justification whatsoever, as Justice Holmes,
dissenting in Lochner, pointed out, the Court has taken its task
to be the constitutionalization of a totally immoral, rapacious,
economic system instead of the promotion of justice, domestic
tranquility, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty.
Consider this short list of examples:
·
It is legal for a vendor to sell a product which
does not work but illegal for a buyer to purchase a product with
a check that does not work.
·
During a corporate bankruptcy, the company's
assets are distributed first to other companies and last, if
anything remains, to employees and even people who have obtained
judgments from courts for company wrongdoing.
·
If a homebuyer who has paid regularly on his
mortgage for 20 and even more years, who has paid the property
taxes and the property's insurance, is forced to default for no
fault of his own, such as a death, serious illness, or economic
collapse, the mortgage holder gets to keep all the money and
gets the house too, transferring the risk that investors are
supposed to bear entirely to the buyer.
·
Entire industries can uniformly require consumers
to accept contracts that require them to relinquish their legal
and even Constitutional rights.
·
And those industries can also uniformly require
consumers to accept contracts that the companies can change in
any way at any time for any reason without gaining the consent
of the consumer. Has a consumer ever had such a right?
·
Companies can collect personal information on
people without their consent yet are allowed to keep company
secrets even those which hide wrongdoing, as when a civil case
is settled and the company involved is allowed to not admit to
any wrongdoing and the court seals the detailed record.
For more,
see my piece
How the
Government Cheats Ordinary Taxpayers, but any astute
reader can add items to this list.
These
situations have one thing in common: each protects the company
at the expense of the person. But nowhere in the Constitution is
there any justification for the protection of the interests of
business; yet the Constitution clearly states that one of the
purposes for which the nation was founded is to "establish
justice."
The
Court's opinions are exercises in obfuscation. Locating anything
that can be called an argument is a daunting task. Claims are
made and justified merely by citations to previous opinions. But
this practice leaves behind the contexts and arguments of the
cited cases. Unless one has a battalion of clerks, checking all
the citations is practically impossible. Luckily, in Citizens
United, Stevens, in dissent, has done the work. He clearly shows
that the Court's rationale lacks any logical basis and amounts
to merely the claim that the Court's majority finds the
rationale in Austin not to be compelling. But this practice is
ludicrous. To use one rationale that is not compelling to reject
another that is not compelling can be likened to trying to
refute a lie by uttering another. After all, the Court's
rationale in Citizens United was not found to be compelling by
the four dissenting members. All split decisions are based on
non-compelling rationales.
This
practice has widespread, deleterious consequences, for it
follows that most, if not all, of the nation's case law has no
compelling foundation. The nation then is not one of laws but
one based on the personal predilections of the Court's members.
See
Corporate
free-speech ruling speaks of shift in Supreme Court.
It accounts for the inconsistencies in the examples cited above
and for the massive disrespect for law and the Court exhibited
by the people.
Although
Stevens has demolished the Court's rationale, there is one
important inconsistency that he overlooks. Kennedy, in the
majority opinion, quotes Douglas in United States v. Automobile
Workers: Under our Constitution it is We The People who are
sovereign. The people have the final say. The legislators are
their spokesmen. The people determine through their votes the
destiny of the nation. It is therefore importantvitally
importantthat all channels of communications be open to them
during every election, that no point of view be restrained or
barred, and that the people have access to the views of every
group in the community. But there is a more important conclusion
that follows from the first three sentences of this quotation
and the Court's action.
Look at
it this way. (1) The people are sovereign; they have the final
say. (2) The legislators are their spokesmen. (3) The sovereign
people have said on numerous occasions through their spokesmen
that corporate financing of electioneering must be limited. Yet
(4) the Court rejects such limitations which nullifies the
people's sovereignty. Instead of the people having the final
say, the final say is the Court's.
If the
Court has the final say, then democracy in America is a sham. It
simply does not exist and the Constitution has been subverted.
No two ways about it: If the people don't have the final say,
the people are not sovereign. The Court has merely allowed the
people to vote and the legislature to enact laws only to the
extent that those laws don't offend the sensibilities of the
Court's members.
But this
subversion is not recent. It happened in 1803 when Marshall, in
Marbury, wrote, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the
judicial department to say what the law is." Unfortunately, no
one objected, and from that moment on, the United States of
America became an oligarchy.
In this
sham democracy, the ruling oligarchy, taking upon itself the
duty to constitutionalize a specific deleterious economic
system, is chiefly responsible for America's ills. The legal
system is unjust, domestic violence is prevalent, liberty is
constrained, general welfare has been replaced by widespread
adversity, and providing for the common defense has been reduced
to providing for a military-industrial corporate complex. Not
what the founding fathers had in mind!
Although
the efforts to amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens
United may be laudable, even if they succeed, the amendment will
not solve America's fundamental problem. The Court will continue
to rule. What's needed is a way to return sovereignty to the
people.
Perhaps a
Constitutional amendment stating that upon a petition of some
percentage of the people, a decision of the Court is to be
submitted to an up or down vote by the people in a referendum.
Even such a procedure is not foolproof, of course, since
referenda can be bought just as easily as elections. But the
people would at least regain their sovereignty. The greater
problem is the immorality that the Court has infused throughout
American society. An unjust legal system breeds injustice.
Everything known as virtuous is everted, and society is
plundered.
Such a
society cannot endure. As its wealth and resources are
plundered, the nation disintegrates. Social problems abound,
resources are exhausted, the infrastructure collapses, poverty
increases, ideological conflicts are exacerbated, and the
Congress becomes dysfunctional. The nation drops lower and lower
into Dante's Inferno. This nation which bills itself as
the world's richest can neither provide the basic needs of its
people nor pay its bills.
The
Court's members write pious platitudes about the need to
preserve the people's "faith in our democracy" and "in their
capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy." If the
court's members believe that the American people still have that
faith, they have been living in the asylum too long. Consider
low voter turnout, the claims of many of those who vote that
they selected the lesser evil of two alternatives, the low
approval ratings of the Congress, the widespread beliefs that
the more things change, the more they things stay the same, that
the nation is headed in the wrong direction, and that all
politicians are liars and crooks. But, of course, to a ruling
oligarchy, none of this matters, does it?
The
greatest mistake human beings make in their endeavors is
forgetting the goals of the enterprise. The founding fathers
clearly stated the nation's goals in the Constitution's
preamble. So J'accuse! Every decision of the Court and
every law that has failed to advance the goals enumerated in the
Constitution's preamble is facially unconstitutional. If "We the
People" doesn't mean that the people come first, then it means
nothing.
John Kozy
is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who blogs on
social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the
U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a
university professor and another 20 years working as a writer.
He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in
academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines,
and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His
on-line pieces can be found on
http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed
from that site's homepage. |
