Portal:Corporate Rights/Why This Matters
This window features changing perspectives about why this matters.
- In response to the Court's decision in the Citizens United case, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, stated:
- "The conservative activist bloc on the Supreme Court reached an unnecessary and improper decision that is going to distort future elections. It creates new rights for Wall Street at the expense of Main Street." [1]
- Senator Russell Feingold observed:
- "Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns. Just six years ago, the Court said that the prohibition on corporations and unions dipping into their treasuries to influence campaigns was ‘firmly embedded in our law.’ Yet this Court has just upended that prohibition, and a century’s worth of campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in government."
- Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut stated:
- "What a terrible day for American democracy. With this 5-4 decision, a deeply divided Supreme Court has essentially given corporations free rein to drown out the voices of the American people, rejecting the sacred democratic principle of ‘one person, one vote.'"
Here's what the new Solicitor General of the United States, Elena Kagen, who argued in favor of the constitutionality of limiting the amount of money corporations can spend in elections on behalf of the Obama Administration, noted that injecting unlimited corporate profits into elections is:
- "inherently likely to corrode the political system, both by actually corrupting public office holders and by creating the appearance of corruption."
The ban on corporations using their vast treasuries to corrupt elections is America's longest standing law limiting spending in federal elections, passed in 1907 over 100 years ago.
The Supreme Court's decision, by the right-wing activist majority on the court, attempts to undo these wise distinctions between corporations and individuals by over-turning federal laws. You can help rebuke the Supreme Court by clicking here.
