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The Spectacle Blog
Brian Beutler, reporter at the liberal Talking Points Memo, has a post mocking Sen. Jeff Sessions for comparing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United campaign finance decision to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated schools. But if you read Sessions’ actual comments, it’s pretty clear he was making the comparison on narrow grounds that both decisions overturned bad precedent.
Beutler quotes Sessions:
“[Marshall] was right on Brown v. Board of Education. It’s akin in my view to the Citizen’s United case. The court sat down and we went back to first principles—What does the Constitution say? Everybody should be equal protection of the laws,” Sessions told me after a Senate vote last night.
“Is it treating people equally to say you can go to this school because of the color of your skin and you can’t?” Sessions asked rhetorically. “We’ve now honestly concluded and fairly concluded that it violates the equal protection clause.”
How is that like Citizens United? “I think this Court, when they said ‘Wait a minute! If you’re talking about a precedent that says the government can deny the right to publish pamphlets, then we’ve got get rid of this one outlier case Austin — 100 years of precedent — and go back to what the Constitution [says].’ I don’t think that’s activism.”
Beutler adds, sarcastically, “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the prohibition on direct corporate expenditures to campaigns is exactly like forcing African-Americans to endure segregation, if you are Senator Jeff Sessions.”
Yet Sessions’ comments don’t attempt to compare the substance of the cases — or somehow say that the injustice of desegregation is the same as the injustice of corporate campaign expenditure restrictions. His argument is only that in both cases the Court found that existing precedent violated the Constitution, so they overturned those cases in favor of a the correct interpretation.
This argument was fleshed out recently by Heritage legal scholars Robert Alt and Hans A. von Spakovsky:
However, those criticisms ignore the fact that the Austin decision on independent expenditures and the part of the McConnell decision on electioneering communications were outliers in the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. The majority’s actions in Citizens United did not constitute judicial activism, but rather upheld basic First Amendment protections against unlawful encroachments by Congress. It is not judicial activism when a judge overturns two relatively recent decisions that were wrongly decided and that are in conflict with a long line of other precedents—particularly if the decision corrects constitutional errors. If this were not true, then the same critics of the Citizens United decision must believe that Plessy v. Ferguson[15] should still be the law of the land today and racial segregation should still be considered “constitutional” since under their slanted and sophomoric definition, the justices of the Supreme Court engaged in judicial “activism” in Brown v. Board of Education.[16] After all, the justices in Brown overturned Plessy and repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine as unconstitutional—and arguably did so when they decided subsequent cases striking down similar policies by recalcitrant jurisdictions that acted contrary to Brown and its progeny.
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More Blog Posts by Philip Klein
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/06/29/sessions-is-right-on-citizens
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Oldefarte| 6.29.10 @ 4:29PM
The President's/Democrats anger over the CITIZENS' ruling is about POLITICS, not the LAW, since it provides corporations/businesses the ability to provide financial contributions to politicians who are favorable toward them [which are REPUBLICANS]. Since said corporations have superior financial abilities/means over labor unions [who contribute to DEMOCRATS], this decision is favorable to Republicans, and that is why same is incurring the rath of Democrats!!!!
Nate| 6.29.10 @ 4:44PM
Money is NOT speech.
Corporations are NOT persons.
Nick| 6.29.10 @ 5:17PM
Nate,
Your vaunted Supreme Court states that they are!
Ha-ha!
Or, are you trying to claim that SCOTUS makes un-Constitutional decisions?
Tim| 6.29.10 @ 4:52PM
Nate:
Corporations ARE legal persons. This is an established fact. Corporations are nothing more than associations of natural persons pooling their resources. To take the rights of a corporation away is to take away the rights of the underlying owners individually.
Also, the 1st Amendment has repeatedly been interpreted as protecting freedom of expression. Clearly, donating money is a form of expression. In fact, donating money to political candidates is arguably akin to political speech, which is exactly what the 1st Amendment is meant to protect. Am I to understand that I have the right to make whatever political statement I like, but not to pay someone else to make it for me? How does that make sense?
Nate| 6.29.10 @ 5:24PM
By your logic BRIBERY would be protected by the first amendment, Tim.
The fact that some have made the (false) claim that corporations are persons does not make it so.
Perpend:
Only a human being can be a person.
Every CEO in America has the God given right to paint a paste-board sign and stand out in the rain and protest the government.
He can write as many letters to his congressman as he wants.
He has the same rights as all of us do.
However, the Congress does have the right and the power to restrict how much MONEY he contributes to the CAMPAIGNS of politicians. This is merely TRUE. The Supreme Court is WRONG on Citizens United.
Nick| 6.29.10 @ 6:43PM
Nate,
Ever heard of the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
It was a Limited Liability Corporation!
The country was formed out of corporations. The word "corporation" comes from the Latin "corpus", i.e. the body.
Giving corporations legal rights has a long, distinguished history in Constitutional law. Try reading up on it, Nate.
Nate| 6.29.10 @ 8:06PM
No, it doesn't.
Corporations did not exist in their present form until the late nineteenth century. And the idea that a corporation should endure constitutional rights like those of a human person is obscene.
Of course people have the right to assemble. That doesn't mean their assembly is a person!
So you know the etymology of "corporation." It doesn't prove much, does it? And I guarantee you the dictionary won't do your work for you.
Nick| 6.29.10 @ 9:05PM
Nate,
Bzzzzzzzzzzz! Wrong, yet again!
Corporations were granted protections against the state in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, (1819).
The only thing obscene is when liberal dazis, like yourself, pretend to know something about the U.S. Constitution, a document you guys hate.
If corporations were NOT treated like legal persons, real people could not sue them, if they were a victim of some wrong.
I thought you stinking liberal dazis liked to sue corporations, Nate?
Francis Beckwith | 6.29.10 @ 6:02PM
"Money is NOT speech.
Corporations are NOT persons."
Then let's ban the buying and selling of pornography in which at least one of the parties is a corporation.
In this case, you're only banning the exchange of money by corporations, since money is not speech and corporations are not persons.
Francis Beckwith | 6.29.10 @ 6:04PM
"Only a human being can be a person."
There goes abortion.