Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gets it. And says so. Neither Citizens United nor McCutcheon holds up in the clear light of day. He talks with the New York Times’ Adam Liptak about what he considers a misleading opinion from Chief Justice Roberts.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. started his controlling opinion with a characteristically crisp and stirring opening sentence: “There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.”
But that was misleading, Justice Stevens said. “The first sentence here,” he said, “is not really about what the case is about.”
The plaintiff, Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, had made contributions to 15 candidates in the 2012 election. He sued so he could give money to 12 more. None of the candidates in the second group was running in Alabama.
Mr. McCutcheon was not trying to participate in electing his own leaders, Justice Stevens said. “The opinion is all about a case where the issue was electing somebody else’s representatives,” he said. ...NYT
Ruy Teixeira looks at political as distinct from economic inequality in an editorial today.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s paper focuses our attention on political inequality. The paper will not get the attention that Piketty’s volume has but perhaps it should. Gilens and Page use a database of 1,779 policy outcomes to show that the views of average citizens exert little or no influence on these outcomes once the views of economic elites and business groups are taken into account. This does not mean that no policies ever align with the views of average citizens — they do when those views agree with those of economic elites. But when average citizens disagree with economic elites, it is economic elites who prevail over citizens. ...NYT
As long as we see money as the key marker of greater intelligence and moral judgment, we’ll accept corporations as super-people with a greater right to determine our future than we are ourselves.
The founding fathers would weep.