Supreme Court to American People: "F You!"

[Slimprofits]

Re: Supreme Court to American People: "F You!"

Even a citizenship requirement is a bit of a farce when an illegal alien can sneak across the border and start popping out kids who will automatically be citizens and eligible to vote in 18 years. When the other side stuffs the ballot box by importing a new population to outvote the natives, where's the legitimacy of democracy? Democracy only makes sense within a homogenous nation with one identity group - one nation. Otherwise it's simply a breeding competition to see which competing identity group can gain power.

One nation, centrally planned, by a homogenous group of utopians. The definition of the word native informs us that children of sneaky immigrants born in the U.S., are native to the U.S. And the idea that place of birth breeds homogeneity is a narrative, not a fact of life. A prostitute from Dallas, probably has much more in common with a prostitute from London, than an engineer or a real estate broker from Dallas.

[jpatter666]

Re: Supreme Court to American People: "F You!"

Democracy only makes sense within a homogenous nation with one identity group - one nation. Otherwise it's simply a breeding competition to see which competing identity group can gain power.

Best argument I've heard yet to deny sheep the vote.

Voting. Let's keep it for people only.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: What is "objective?

Good points Polish Silver. There are gray areas and to deny that they exist is to deny reality.

BUT, and it is a big one that deserves capital letters, that is no reason why we should accept the SCs proposal that money equals speech or its brother, that corporations are people. These are such great perversions of the founder's vision that I cannot for the life of me understand how a supposedly intelligent group of scholars could arrive at such a conclusion. My god, corporations had existed for hundreds of years prior to the founding of this nation and there is not one single reference to them in the constitution.

Not one single time does the word "corporation" appear in our founding document. Not once.

Now are we to believe that the framers actually believed that these business entities were to be given a pretty damned large portion of the rights reserved to citizens (in some cases they even exceed them) and yet neglected to mention them one single time? They wished to have corporations enjoy a protected status similar to that of actual human beings and yet left them to the vagaries and wishes of state legislatures?

Even the thought of it makes me blush in shame. At times it is difficult to believe the depths to which depravity can take over a mind and lead it to believe things it ~wishes~ were true in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

I'm getting off my pulpit now and will open the floor to other opinions.

Will

I agree with you Will, on the two central points you make here.
It is simply not true that money is speech, and not true that corporations are people.

Any policies that spring from falsehoods are likely to have tragic results.
We do better to build policies upon true facts.

[jiimbergin]

Re: What is "objective?

I agree with you Will, on the two central points you make here.
It is simply not true that money is speech, and not true that corporations are people.

Any policies that spring from falsehoods are likely to have tragic results.
We do better to build policies upon true facts.

I too agree with these 2 points.

[vt]

Re: What is "objective?

Another viewpoint based on previous Supreme Court cases:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...&mg=reno64-wsj

Welcome to the Collective

Justice Breyer turns the First Amendment on its head.

• By JAMES TARANTO

April 3,2014

In his plurality opinion in yesterday's free-speech case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice John Roberts notes an anomaly in contemporary "liberal" First Amendment jurisprudence: "If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades--despite the profound offense such spectacles cause--it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition."
We'd take the point a step further. The examples Roberts cites all involve fringe politicalexpression. But the First Amendment also protects outré speech outside the political realm--most notably pornography, the subject of a great deal of Supreme Court jurisprudence over the past few decades, in which judicial liberals took the lead in expanding free-speech rights.
In recent years something of a consensus has emerged. When the court extended First Amendment protection to "depictions of animal cruelty" (U.S. v. Stevens, 2010) and violent video games (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011), the decisions were written by Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia, respectively, for 8-1 and 7-2 majorities.
So why have the court's "liberals" adopted a hostile attitude toward political speech, which has long been understood as being at the core of First Amendment protection? In his McCutcheon dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer elaborates the theory behind this odd development.
Enlarge Image


Breyer Associated Press




We should note that Breyer has proved more willing than his liberal colleagues to uphold restrictions on nonpolitical speech. He was one of the two dissenters (with JusticeClarence Thomas ) in Brown v. EMA, which involved a statute restricting sales of games to minors. He also dissented in U.S. v. Playboy Entertainment Group(2000), which invalidated limits on sexually explicit cable TV programming.
But in both those cases Breyer was alone among the court's liberals. In McCutcheon, his dissent gained the support of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. It's a familiar pattern: A series of high court rulings pitting campaign finance restrictions against free speech, beginning in 2007, have been decided 5-4, with the same majority as in McCutcheon and the identity of the dissenters varying only by virtue of changes in the court's personnel.
Yesterday's decision was fairly narrow. It invalidated a statutory provision limiting the total contributions an individual could make to congressional candidates, party committees and political action committees during an election cycle. But it let stand the limits on contributions to each candidate or committee. That means, among other things, that a contributor may now give to as many candidates as he wants, but only $5,200 apiece ($2,600 each for the primary and general election). Thomas argued for striking down the individual limits too, which is why Roberts's opinion did not command a majority.
In making the case for the constitutionality of restrictions on campaign contributions, Breyer advances an instrumental view of the First Amendment. He quotes Justice Louis Brandeis, who in 1927 "wrote that the First Amendment's protection of speech was 'essential to effective democracy,' " and Brandeis's contemporary Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who in 1931 argued that " 'a fundamental principle of our constitutional system' is the 'maintenance of the opportunity for free political discussion to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people" (emphasis Breyer's).
After citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (!) views on the shortcomings of representative democracy, Breyer quotes James Wilson, one of the Founding Fathers, who argued in a 1792 commentary that the First Amendment's purpose was to establish a "chain of communication between the people, and those, to whom they have committed the exercise of the powers of government." Again quoting Wilson, Breyer elaborates: "This 'chain' would establish the necessary 'communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments' between the people and their representatives, so that public opinion could be channeled into effective governmental action."
And here's how Breyer sums it all up: "Accordingly, the First Amendment advances not only the individual's right to engage in political speech, but also the public's interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters."
The emphasis on "matters" is again Breyer's. We'd have italicized "collective" as the key concept. As with the Second Amendment, he and the other dissenters assert a "collective" right, the establishment of which is purportedly the Constitution's ultimate purpose, as a justification for curtailing an individual right.
In this case they at least acknowledge the individual right exists. But then the First Amendment, unlike the Second, has no prefatory clause explaining its purpose; it simply says "Congress shall make no law . . ." Breyer has to venture outside the text to find a reason to read that prohibition equivocally.
It's important to note that when Breyer refers to "collective" rights, what he does not have in mind is individuals exercising their rights by voluntarily collecting themselves into organizations. In fact, the prevailing left-liberal view, most notably with respect to Citizens United v. FEC (2010), is that collections of individuals, at least when they take corporate form, have (or should have) no rights.
The only "collective" that matters to Breyer is the one from which you cannot opt out except by the extreme measure of renouncing your citizenship: "the people" or "the public" as a whole. In Breyer's view, the purpose of the First Amendment is to see that (in Chief Justice Hughes's words) "the will of the people" is done. Individual rights are but a means to that end. To the extent they frustrate it, they ought to be curtailed. You will be assimilated.
That resolves the conundrum we noted atop this column. Fringe political speech like flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades is so broadly unappealing as to have no effect on "the will of the people." The same is true of nonpolitical forms of expression such as pornography, violent video games and depictions of animal cruelty. (Breyer's willingness to countenance restrictions of the first two has to do with the protection of children, not of the body politic.)
Only mainstream political expression has the potential to thwart the "collective" will, and thus, in the view of Breyer and his fellow dissenters, it alone is deserving of restriction on such a rationale. That stands the First Amendment on its head. Its purpose may be to "make government responsive," as Wilson argued, but the means by which it does so is the limitation of government power and protection of individual freedom.

[suki]

Re: Supreme Court to American People: "F You!"

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the countries of origin for the largest numbers of illegal immigrants are as follows (latest of 2009):^[7]

Mexico	6,650,000	62%	+42%
El Salvador	530,000	5%	+25%
Guatemala	480,000	4%	+65%
Honduras	320,000	3%	+95%
Philippines	270,000	2%	+33%
India	200,000	2%	+64%
Korea	200,000	2%	+14%
Ecuador	170,000	2%	+55%
Brazil	150,000	1%	+49%
China	120,000	1%	-37%
Other	1,650,000	15%	-17%

These numbers may be correct, but they may also be misleading, and possibly do not account for migration of illegals out of the US:

Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less

This sentiment is corroborated by those who work in the more labor reliant parts of Ag:
We’re running out of farm workers. Immigration reform won’t help.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Supreme Court to American People: "F You!"

by Jonathan Shaw
July-August 2012

http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/07/a...r-the-republic

For a decade, Lawrence Lessig, a mild-seeming legal scholar, pursued the intricacies of updating American copyright law to reflect the rise of the digital era, the Internet, and new means of producing and disseminating texts, music, images, and software. Based first at Harvard, then Stanford, he co-founded organizations such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit that gives people legal tools to control use of their creative output, and argued that mashups (of songs or YouTube videos, for example) are culturally important products that (in some circumstances) can be legal under the principle of fair use.

He felt he was making progress: “The public was getting it. Businesses were getting it. Universities. Everybody had come to the recognition that ‘There is something wrong with the existing system,’ and that it needed to be updated—but we were making no progress in the context of policymakers.” At first, he was puzzled. But gradually he realized the problem lay in the sclerotic, gridlocked policymaking system itself—particularly in Congress. “We weren’t making any progress because money was so inherent and tied to decisions,” he says now. “The public domain had no lobbyists. The ideas of the public domain weren’t even on the table because there was no infrastructure for putting them there.”

As long as Congress remains in the thrall of “the economy of influence”—its members dependent on money to fund reelection campaigns—“no progress would be made on copyright or any other public-policy question,” he explains. “It wasn’t just esoteric areas like copyright, it was also fundamental issues like global warming, healthcare, or any number of others.”

That set Lessig off in a new direction—including an exploratory, aborted run for Congress and, ultimately, in 2008, a return to Harvard. He now directs the Safra Center for Ethics, serves as Furman professor of law and leadership at Harvard Law School, and investigates the American government and what ails it. His findings, recently published in Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, have led him to conclude that nothing less than overhauling the way elections are funded—involving a tool never before invoked in American democracy—is required.


“A Republic, if You Can Keep It”

Lessig comes to his conviction that American democracy is dysfunctional as a lawyer and citizen who has migrated from Reagan Republican to concerned liberal. His apprehensions about Congress transcend partisanship. He has worked with Tea Party leaders and Occupiers alike because he sees grass-roots intervention as the only way to fix a system that is broken. A host of issues threatens the nation, he points out, and every informed citizen knows it, yet Congress can’t achieve much. Elected representatives deadlock on key points such as reform of the financial system—after its failures nearly cause a global meltdown—even when solutions seem obvious and attainable.

When Lessig contemplates this impasse, he sees political polarization as merely a symptom of a much deeper sickness: Congress has been “corrupted” by its members’ dependence on money from lobbyists—and from the special interests hiring those lobbyists—to fund their reelection campaigns.

This “dependence corruption,” described in Republic, Lost, does not mean venal corruption: bribery or bags of cash for personal use. The Framers of the Constitution, he points out, sought to guard against that by explicitly outlawing the corrupting potential of gifts from foreign nations in Article 1.

A portrait set in diamonds (a gift to Benjamin Franklin) and other expensive gifts had been lavished on representatives of the emerging nation by European rulers, and “raised a reasonable concern,” Lessig writes. “Would agents of the republic keep their loyalties clear if in the background they had in view these expected gifts from foreign kings?” Likewise, “the Framers wanted to avoid…Parliament’s loss of independence from the Crown” resulting from royal gifts of “offices and perks” that pulled members “away from the view of the people they were intended to represent.” The Founders were aware of the fragility of the system they had fledged: when Franklin walked from Independence Hall as the Constitutional Convention ended, Lessig writes, a woman asked what he had wrought. “A republic, madam,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

The Framers, Lessig says, had just one kind of dependence in mind for members of Congress: a dependence on the people. He quotes The Federalist (the then-anonymous essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay that are often used as a contemporary account of the Framers’ intentions) to make this point: number 52 describes the House of Representatives as that “branch of the federal government which ought to be dependent on the people alone” (emphasis added).

But in the last two decades, Lessig writes, members of Congress have developed a fearsome dependency: campaign cash. The total amount spent on campaigns by all candidates for Congress in 2010 was $1.8 billion. Fundraising has become a way of life, and extravagant giving has been institutionalized; only the diamonds are missing.

Lessig cites the example of Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana), chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, whose position gave him a critical role in the debate over President Obama’s healthcare proposal. Between 2003 and 2008, Baucus received $5 million in campaign contributions from the financial, insurance, and health industries. But Lessig also cites similar examples from both sides of the aisle, blaming neither political party in particular. The corruption, he says, is systemic and systematic: in 2009 alone, lobbyists spent $3.5 billion, or about $6.5 million per each elected member in Congress.

Do gifts of money really change recipients’ behavior? Studies have suggested that, on any particular issue, there is no apparent link between a legislator’s vote and lobbyist money—the data don’t show a pattern that can be discerned. “But certainly,” Lessig says in an interview, “money can affect what goes into the bills” before Congress on issue after issue. “Let’s say we are talking about healthcare: money guaranteed that single-payer health insurance was not on the table. There could be nothing more fundamental to that bill than that.”

Furthermore, Americans don’t believe all that money has no effect—and that is a problem in itself. If the 99.9 percent of Americans who don’t have enough money to buy access to Congress believe their participation in their democracy doesn’t count for much, he says, they will choose to do something else, such as make a rational choice to play with their children instead.

And the need for campaign cash does have one clear and important effect, Lessig argues. Members of Congress now spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money rather than deliberating as they were elected to do. For example, even as fundraising has increased exponentially since 1994—the moment when control of Congress began shifting back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, intensifying the need for campaign funds to secure a majority—so the amount of time members of Congress spend in committee meetings has dropped dramatically. “I don’t have enough data to say money is the driver,” Lessig admits, “but it is consistent with that proposition.”

When Lessig makes this case in speeches, he reports, reactions range from disbelief to rationalization. “Some say, ‘It can’t possibly be true.’ Others say, ‘They’re raising money; they are spending time connecting to people.’ That ignores the fact that they are connecting to 0.1 percent of the people, which is not ‘connecting to people.’” But “the vast majority” is stunned into recognizing “There is something really wrong here.” Lessig likens this dependency on money to cocaine addiction, in which users spend “70 percent of their time feeding their habit.”

The corrupting influence of money manifests itself in Washington culture in other ways as well. When Lessig interviewed convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff as part of a series hosted by the Center for Ethics last December, for example, Abramoff described how offering a member of Congress or congressional staffer a high-paying job on K Street (home to big lobbying firms) is, in effect, a way of hiring them on the spot. They may be two years from the end of their terms, Abramoff said, but from that moment—with no money down—they are, in the back of their minds, working for their future employer. Lessig therefore suggests extending the ban on moving from Congress to a lobbying job from the current one year for House members and two years for staffers and Senators to seven years.


In the Hands of the People

The problem of money in politics runs deep, with effects that are difficult to untangle, but Lessig cites a particularly dramatic instance to illustrate his point. Between 1995 and 2009, he reports, the government spent more than $70 billion subsidizing corn production. As a result, “Every $1 of profits earned by [food conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland’s] corn-sweetener operation costs consumers $10,” says Lessig, quoting from a Cato Institute study.

Some of the support was intended to aid family farms, but the benefits have accrued mainly to large companies. Meanwhile, the subsidies have made high-fructose corn syrup cheap and raw corn so inexpensive that some farmers feed it to their cattle. Now the corn sweetener—present in 40 percent of the food on grocery shelves—has been implicated in the obesity and diabetes epidemics. And cattle—which don’t digest corn properly—develop gastrointestinal bacteria that must be treated with antibiotics, in turn facilitating the evolution of drug-resistant “super bugs” that can infect humans. “You begin to poison people through the food-production system,” Lessig says. “There’s nobody on the right who can say this is a good thing. And people on the left who might have supported this system originally, because it was going to support family farms—they don’t like this either. Yet think about the political will that would be necessary to turn this spigot off! I don’t think we have that political capacity.”

That conviction and the Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (which allows corporations and unions unlimited spending on independent political communications) have led him to call for a constitutional convention—something that hasn’t happened since the Constitution was written—to propose amendments that would ensure Congress is truly dependent on the people alone. It seems an extreme approach, but Lessig discusses many other possible remedies and strategies for achieving them in his book, such as donor anonymity (to break the clear link between contributions and political favors) or one-issue candidates who vow to quit Congress once reformed. He follows those remedies down forking paths, seemingly to every possible outcome, and concludes that a convention has the best, albeit slight, chance of success.

The Constitution describes a mechanism for triggering such a gathering (two-thirds of state legislatures must call on Congress to convene a convention, and three-quarters of the states, 38 in all, must ratify any proposed change for it to be adopted), but every time the country has faced the prospect, Congress has acted first, “most famously in the context of the Seventeenth Amendment” mandating direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote, Lessig reports. “The states came within one vote of calling for a convention” and Congress responded to this reformist pressure.

Lessig does not say what, exactly, such a convention should propose. Elsewhere in Republic, Lost, he advances the idea of democracy vouchers, a publicly funded campaign-finance system that would give every citizen $50 to support his or her candidate of choice, and would limit total contributions from any single person to $100. But this system would apply only to candidates who “opt-in,” says the libertarian Lessig, leaving other candidates to take money from super PACs, corporations, or industry lobbyists.

A constitutional convention could make limiting that kind of contribution clearly legal, as he clearly hopes that it would, while leaving the specifics to the delegates themselves, who he believes should be ordinary citizens from across the country, “a random selection drawn from the voter rolls.” In fact, he writes: “I recognize that of all the insanity strewn throughout this book, this will strike readers as the most extreme. Ordinary citizens? Are you crazy? Proposing amendments to our Constitution? When two-thirds of Americans can’t even identify what the Bill of Rights is?”

Yet it is a solution characteristic of Lessig, this former chairman of the Pennsylvania Teen Age Republicans who turned liberal while studying philosophy at the University of Cambridge in England—an unconventional, innovative, and radical thinker. His proposal in a single stroke does away with experts, politicians, and activists.

It also highlights Lessig’s idealism: a commitment to American democracy bordering on faith. In One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic, an ebook he published in February as a follow-up to Republic, Lost, he describes the principles that ordinary citizens—perhaps including those named to a constitutional convention—might pledge to uphold: “To provide that public elections are publicly funded; to limit, and make transparent, contributions and independent political expenditures; and to reaffirm that when the Declaration of Independence spoke of entities ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’ it was speaking of natural persons only.”

As principles go, simple. And in his e-book, Lessig concludes that, measured against problems such as fascism, institutionalized racism, and sexism that “our nation tackled throughout the course of the twentieth century,” this “narrow but profound flaw at the core of our Constitution…that has allowed our government to become captured” by moneyed special interests is “tiny by comparison.” What it will take to fix things, he says, is for Americans to recognize that “the corrupting influence of money is the first problem facing this nation. That unless we solve this problem, we won’t solve anything else.”

[Slimprofits]

Re: Supreme Court to American People: "F You!"

The Forgotten Law of Lobbying - Zephyr Teachout - Fordham University School of Law - January 22, 2014 --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=2383317