I thought I had a pretty fair grasp of the history of America’s first Gilded Age (due to a life-long fondness for Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne, and Teddy Roosevelt), but Charlie Pierce has taught me something I did not know in his post on the proposed anti-Citizens-United amendment:
Left to work its dark magic, the Citizens United decision will forever deform American politics in such a way that a corporate oligarchy will entrench itself in the democratic institutions beyond the capability of anyone ever to dig it out again. Just yesterday, for example, Citizens itself announced that it’s in for a six-figure ad buy to try and rescue Ohio governor John Kasich’s anti-union legislation in Ohio. But the day before that, Senator Tom Udall introduced a Constitutional amendment to more or less overturn the damn thing, and, really, there is is no other remedy. Anything short of this won’t do, because Citizens United contains within it the judicial wherewithal by which any simple legislative attempt to undo it will be ruled unconstitutional based on the theory behind Citizens United. The Roberts Court wanted to fashion a permanent IED in the laws regarding campaign finance, and that’s pretty much what they did…
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Personally, I would have liked to have seen an even tougher amendment (in for a dime, in for a SuperPAC!) that took head-on the ridiculous legal doctrines by which corporations are considered people, and money is considered speech. The former is a particularly spectacular absurdity, the preposterous history of which is laid out in detail by historian Jack Beatty in his essential The Age of Betrayal. It arises from an 1886 case called Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. (The fact that this is a episode out of our previous Gilded Age should scare you more than it tickles your sense of irony.) The case involved the taxation by the county of properties belonging to various railroads including, obviously, the Southern Pacific. At this time in history, of course, the government and all its branches were lousy with the influence of the railroads. Before the Supreme Court, the railroads advanced a pet theory — rooted in old English common law that called corporations “artificial persons” — that argued that, because they were the creations of their stockholders, corporations should be considered persons under the newly passed 14th Amendment, which had been enacted to insure the rights of newly freed slaves, but what the hell. Because corporations had these rights, so the theory went, any attempt by, say, California, to tax them denied them the rights of equal protection under the law promised by the 14th Amendment…
Click the link to discover how a couple of extremely interested parties by the names of Morrison Waite and J.C. Bancroft Davis turned the Fourteenth Amendment into every bankster’s favorite tool. (I haven’t read The Age of Betrayal, but it looks like I’m gonna have to get a copy.)
“A permanent IED in the laws regarding campaign finance”Post + Comments (70)