Are We Really Just Too Stupid To Merit Free Elections Anymore?
Posted on | February 19, 2012 | 19 Comments
by Smitty
A Montana case on corporate spending on campaigns is exhuming the hoary specter of the Citizens United ruling:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, also supported the delay, but said that the case “will give the Court an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United [v. Federal Election Commission] should continue to hold sway.”
Didn’t Whitman and Fiorina show in California in 2010 that throwing boatloads of cash at an election may not work?
Or, if formerly pre-emptive favorite Mitt Romney’s SuperPAC carpet bombing were really effective, wouldn’t he be, you know, a pre-emptive favorite for the GOP nomination right now?
Shag it all: let these corporations spend whatever, and let the informed voters figure out who’s worth the vote, and who is simply a venom bucket.
All of these recent attempts at federal over-reach are troubling in two ways:
- Managed speech is not free speech, and the stronger the precedent for managing speech, the more dissent-crushing will occur.
- Even more subtle than the attack on freedom of expression is the attack on the notion of liberty. Ginsburg and Breyer (or Sotomayor or Kagan, for that matter) support the notion of liberty? Or are they advocates for the nanny state that would eliminate liberty in the name of Holy Progress? Who am I kidding: of course they’re nanny-staters.
I would that this post were a trifle reactionary, and that the SCOTUS did not pose a threat to liberty. This blog will accept a little finger-pointing and mumblings of “tinfoil hat” in exchange for communicating the knowledge that people are paying attention back to those enemies of liberty.
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