Word: electioneers
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...Which make it a perfect subject for an apocalyptic battle among the Justices of today's Supreme Court. Nothing revs them up like a symbolic fight over an intractable issue. Thursday's pile of opinions in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, striking down certain limits on corporate electioneering, found them arrayed in their now familiar 5-to-4 pattern and firing their big rhetorical guns. Depending on which very, very long opinion you prefer, they either struck a blow for the First Amendment or sold American politics into bondage to soulless corporations. (See 25 people who mattered...
This raised a question in the minds of the court's majority. If freedom of speech protects the right of rich individuals to use television to distribute their political views during election season, does the same right extend to rich groups - like businesses, labor unions, the NRA, the ACLU or...
A long history of court opinions shows that entirely reasonable Justices have disagreed about this question for many years. There is an obvious tension that open-minded people can easily recognize between freedom of speech and the danger of certain voices drowning everyone else out. On certain subjects, though, this...
This wasn't a partisan opinion, though some headlines have suggested that, focusing on the word corporation to mean Big Business, as in Republican. But the decision does not simply apply to business. It lifts limits on all incorporated groups. Under the law that was struck down, Kennedy noted, "the...
Brown's surge caught national Democrats napping. But their GOP rivals moved fast in December when they noticed an internal poll that showed Brown closing the gap to only 13 points against Coakley. What really grabbed their attention, however, was something deeper in the data: among those most likely to...