The Fortnightly Rant for December 31, 2010, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 7, posted on Sunday, January 16, 2011.
Nothing lasts forever — including, mercifully, the year 2010. A single dismal occurrence can well represent a whole host of others that would be too depressing to list: Last January, our First Congressional District seat was occupied by the best Representative it has had in living memory. A few days from now, that post will be filled by a man who was already under an ethical cloud even before he won the Republican primary election. A more abrupt descent from the sublime to the ridiculous would be hard to imagine.
In a year shot through with venality, corruption and stupidity, one event in particular virtually guarantees that the next year, and probably the next decade, will be even worse: the Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission.
The immediate background of the decision was this: in an effort to limit the influence of money in politics, Congress passed in 2002 the McCain-Feingold Act. One provision of the Act prevented a Right Wing pressure group called Citizens United, run by a man named David Bossie, from running a video hit piece aimed at Hillary Clinton, the then-presumptive Democratic front-runner, within 30 days of the 2008 Democratic Primaries.
In the Supreme Court’s January 21st Citizens United decision, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, expressed the Court’s dismay at this brazen attempt by Congress to deprive the people of valuable information:
“The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The Government [via McCain-Feingold] has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ … And ‘the electorate [has been] deprived of information, knowledge and opinion vital to its function.’ … By suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and non-profit, the Government prevents their voices and viewpoints from reaching the public and advising voters on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests. Factions will necessarily form in our Republic, but the remedy of ‘destroying the liberty’ of some factions is ‘worse than the disease.’ … Factions should be checked by permitting them all to speak … , and by entrusting the people to judge what is true and what is false.”
Oh, happy day — justice has been served: thanks to the Supreme Court, convenience store clerks earning minimum wage will no longer enjoy an unfair advantage over the Exxon Mobil Corporation.
The “Significant” Mr. Bossie
Furthermore, in achieving this great victory for equality under the law, Justice Kennedy asserted that one of “the voices that best represent[s] the most significant segments of the economy” belongs to David Bossie. Under Justice Kennedy’s standards, Jack the Ripper might have qualified as one of the pre-eminent British surgeons of the 19th century.
The very model of a modern bottom-feeding political operative, Bossie’s slime trail has been tracked back to 1992. That year, in an effort to smear Bill Clinton, Bossie barged into the hospital room of a man recovering from a stroke in Georgia, and tried to grill his wife about their daughter’s suicide. That same year George [Herbert] Hoover Walker Bush — the man Bossie was trying to get elected — was so disgusted by his tactics that he filed a Federal Elections Commisison complaint against him. In 1998, Bossie achieved a truly rare distinction. He was fired from the Whitewater witch hunt committee for unethical behavior — his handling of some deceptively edited audiotapes was so sleazy it offended Newt Gingrich.
Opening the (Sewage) Floodgates
The Court could have settled for ruling that similarly devious projects could proceed unfettered in the future. But no — it went much further. The Court ruled that Congress had no right to prevent corporations from spending as much as they want in order to influence elections.*
And spend they did. America’s corporations can’t seem to find the money to hire anyone to work for them, but they’ve shown they’ve got plenty to spend buying a shiny new Congress. A study of the effects of the Citizens United decision on the 2010 mid-term elections was recently published by Bill de Blasio, the Public Advocate for the City of New York. It found that “Citizens United spending represented 15 percent of total political spending,” amounting to “over $85 million in all U.S. Senate races.” Citizens United also increased anonymous spending dramatically: “New anonymous spending allowed by Citizens United represented 30 percent of all spending by outside groups.” And the decision increased negative campaigning dramatically: “Anonymous spending groups created by Citizens United spent 20 percent more on negative advertisements than groups required to disclose.”
Elections Have Consequences
Whoever the anonymous sources were who funded all those negative ads, their money was not wasted. They got what they paid for in the House of Representatives: a resounding majority. They would have taken the Senate, too, if a pair of loose dingbats had not won the GOP primaries in Nevada and Delaware. The slimmest of margins in the Senate and the President’s veto pen are about all that stand in the way of their agenda: continued reduction of taxes on the rich, and the gutting of Social Security.
The Long Con
The Citizens United debacle, narrowly defined, has taken just two years to play itself out. More broadly considered, though, it is just the most recent element in an ongoing plot — let us call it what it is — that began almost forty years ago.
In 1971, a wealthy lawyer and tobacco lobbyist named Lewis F. Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, declaring that the “American economic system [was] under broad attack [from] Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries,” as well as from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” The nation’s only hope for salvation, Powell argued, would come from “businessmen [ready] to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” working together to create and fund a massive, multi-pronged, pro-business propaganda machine. A few months after Powell wrote his memo, Richard Nixon successfully nominated him for the Supreme Court.
Within a few years the Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in Media, the Cato Institute, the Claremont Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and other organizations were up and running along the lines that Powell had suggested. By the time he retired in 1987 the propaganda machine he envisioned was fully formed.
Now, with the Court’s Citizens United decision, it has escaped from all confinement.
XXX
* For the record, this exercise in judicial restraint was carried out by Justices Arthur Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, appointed by President Ronald Reagan; Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H.[H.]W. Bush; and Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush.