Recently in Citizens United Category

"These records show that while the chamber boasts of representing more than three million "businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors. Many of those large donations coincided with lobbying or political campaigns that potentially affected the donors."

The republic stands upon the edge of a knife, people. Stray but a little, and it will fall. While the NYT belatedly figures out the Chamber is up to no good in its overwhelming campaign spending -- thank you, Citizens United -- the Center for American Progress discovers that the vast right-wing conspiracy actually holds meetings(!):

"While the Koch brothers -- each worth over $21.5 billion -- have certainly underwritten much of the right, their hidden coordination with other big business money has gone largely unnoticed...The memo, along with an attendee list of about 210 people, shows the titans of industry -- from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons -- working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives to plan the 2010 election, as well as ongoing conservative efforts through 2012."

"The SpeechNow decision effectively widens the field of organizations that can raise and spend money on politics more freely in light of the Citizens United decision, which swept aside decades of legislative restrictions on the role of corporations in political campaigns."

The disaster on the Gulf isn't the only gusher to worry about. Relying almost exclusively on Citizens United for their reasoning, the three-judge DC Court of Appeals struck down limits on individual contributions to advocacy groups last March, paving the way for even more cold hard cash overflowing the system. [FEC overview.] "The D.C. Circuit's ruling was the first to apply and significantly expand [Citizens United], which invalidated limits on corporate expenditures in federal campaigns."

I had heard very ominous rumblings about this hearing in the days after CU, but somehow missed that the actual decision had been handed down (Working as intended: It was dumped on a Friday) and only caught it on account of yesterday's injunction. (Weirdly, there was no press release from CREW, Common Cause, or Public Citizen either, although PIRG was on the case.) The FEC does seem to be looking toward a Supreme Court appeal...but it's hard to see that turning out very well, is it?

"The festival was over and the boys were all planning for a fall.
The cabaret was quiet except for the drilling in the wall.
The curfew had been lifted and the gambling wheel shut down.
Anyone with any sense had already left town.
He was standing in the doorway looking like the Jack of Hearts."

Thanks, Bob, I got it from here. As the links above attest, the sordid dealings of "Casino Jack" Abramoff and his GOP associates -- most notably Tom DeLay and Bob Ney -- made for solid blog fodder here at GitM for several years. So, between that and my current place of work, I probably had more interest than most in Alex Gibney's Casino Jack and the United States of America, a documentary recounting Abramoff's rise-and-fall. And...well, it's not bad. But, unfortunately, it's not great either. And in terms of making the points he wants to make, I don't get the sense Gibney really stuck the landing.

Part of the problem is Casino Jack is a maddeningly mercurial sort -- and unlike the recently-released Ney, the soon to trial DeLay, chastened aide Neil Volz, and others, he and "Gimme Five" kickback co-conspirator Michael Scanlon choose not to go on the record here. So, right away, there is a cipher at the center of this ostensibly biographical story. And even more problematic for the film's narrative and structure: Casino Jack had his fingers in a lot of pies, and if there was any way to game the political system somehow to make money, he was on the case. In short, this is one long, twisted, and convoluted story.

And thus, Gibney is left with the ungainly task of trying to explain how Abramoff turned Northern Marianas sweatshops into a bribe farm for GOP congressmen, and how his shady, playing-both-sides kickback operation gamed Native American casinos. Not to mention how his phantom think-tank on the Delaware coast was in fact a money-laundering outfit. Or how the seemingly Mob-connected takeover of a fleet of Suncruz casino ships -- and the murder of its former owner -- went down. And, amidst all this, how Abramoff managed to move up the GOP food chain by throwing his money around, and was depressingly successful at it. This is all not even withstanding weird tangents like Red Scorpion. So, while Gibney does an admirable job explaining the details of these various operations, he has to jump through so many hoops to get it all down that the Big Picture often gets lost.

I'm probably being a little too hard on this doc, if only because I went in with very high expectations. I was hoping Casino Jack would be more of a concise and devastating prosecutorial brief about the plague of unfettered money in politics, but it's more broad and meandering than that. (And, to be fair, whenever you take a subject this broad, there will be some meandering -- See also Why We Fight.) Still, as I said, even if the high-level connections aren't quite nailed down, Gibney does a good job of nailing the specifics of each particular grift -- the sweatshops and casinos and whatnot. And, coming across with the nerdy charm of a more buttoned-down, politically-minded version of R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, author and ex-Republican Thomas Frank (The Wrecking Crew, What's the Matter with Kansas) is an appealing interviewee throughout, and he enlivens the discussion considerably.

Speaking of Frank's ex-GOP years: If you already knew the contours of this Abramoff story (and I suspect most of the people who bother to see this film will), perhaps the most interesting part of Casino Jack is the first half-hour, which chronicles the old College Republican days of friends Abramoff, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed. And from Reed's penchant for outlandish stunts at campus protests, to Norquist's unabashed admiration for Leninist tactics, to Abramoff et al's abortive attempt to engage the Third World in their free-market fundie ways, it's seem as if the young Reagan Right of the '80s were mainly just a cracked-funhouse-mirror version of the '60's New Left they so despise. (This is also in keeping with what you might expect from books like Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, about the '64 Goldwater campaign.)

Still, as we move into the present day and these young conservatives fan out into the political system, Casino Jack and the United States of Money unfortunately gets its overarching message muddled. Is this movie about the former (Abramoff) or the latter (the U.S.M.)? Is Casino Jack a uniquely well-connected criminal mastermind, or, worse, the clearest expression of a political system overwhelmed by cold, hard cash? It's true the answer to this question may just be "yes," but the documentary can't seem to decide at times if it wants to skewer Abramoff (and, by extension, his "unindicted co-conspirators") or catch bigger game -- the whole rotten system -- and as a result, both sorta end up writhing off the hook.

At one point, Casino Jack gets caught up recounting the exceptionally douchey e-mail traffic between Abramoff and Scanlon, which is fun and all. (The best laugh in the movie is when the beach bum lifeguard running their Delaware front operation turns out to be savvier than these two would-be Masters of the Universe: "Uh, you've been putting this all in e-mails?") But, even as we delve into these sordid details, the scarier implications of the Abramoff story feel shortchanged -- that not only does this pay-to-play stuff seem business as usual for the Dubya White House and DeLay ring, but worse, that this monied corruption festering at the heart of our republic is both legal and even institutionalized.

And so, when the Citizens United fiasco comes up at the end, it unfortunately feels like a bit of a non-sequitur, rather than the sad culmination of the story we've been told for two hours. Casino Jack and the United States of Money is an able attempt at muckraking, but, to my mind, it fails to capture the true horror unfolding here: Jack Abramoff may be languishing in prison right now, and for many, many good reasons. But the mess of a system he thrived in is still right here with us -- and if anything, after Citizens United, it might soon be getting worse.

"'I am confident that she's a solid, reliable modern Democrat...She's not George McGovern or whoever the liberal left of the Democratic party would want, but the left of the Democratic party isn't where the party is any more. She's a good, solid Clinton-Obama Democrat.'"

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? Particularly that she'll be replacing the irreplaceable John Paul Stevens. In any case, President Obama has made his second pick for the Supreme Court, and it is his Solicitor General and former Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan. "As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition."

Making the progressive case for Kagan: Larry Lessig, an old friend of hers: "The Kagan I know is a progressive...[T]he core of Kagan's experience over the past two decades has been all about moving people of different beliefs to the position she believes is correct. Not by compromise, or caving, but by insight and strength. I've seen her flip the other side." Lessig expounds on this coalition-builder argument here: "To hear the liberals talk about it, it sounds like they think we need a Thomas or Scalia of the Left...But nobody who understands the actual dynamics of the Supreme Court could actually believe that such a strategy would produce 5 votes." (To which one must ask, really? Who's gonna flip?)

Making the progressive case against Kagan: Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "[G]iven that there are so many excellent candidates who have a long, clear commitment to a progressive judicial philosophy, why would Obama possibly select someone who -- at best -- is a huge question mark?...I believe Kagan's absolute silence over the past decade on the most intense Constitutional controversies speaks very poorly of her." This was a follow-up from another piece, where he argued: "Kagan, from her time at Harvard, is renowned for accommodating and incorporating conservative views, the kind of 'post-ideological' attribute Obama finds so attractive." Interestingly, this last part seems much the same argument Lessig's making in her favor, with the valence changed.

(As an aside, this feud got a bit heated, with Greenwald deeming Lessig a liar and stooge. Having been on the wrong end of Greenwald's wrath myself on the Citizens United case, Lessig's rebuttal to this charge sounded all-too familiar: "Chill, Glenn. Dial down the outrage. Dial back the hyperbole. And stop calling those who applaud you liars...[Y]ou can make your point well enough without painting everyone else as liars or constitutional crazies." True story.)

Anyway, speaking of Citizens United, since the President has explicitly said that decision is lousy law several times over, I presume he's made sure Kagan is in agreement on that front. (He has, right?) And, as I said back during John Roberts' nomination, my feeling is generally the president's prerogative in choosing Supreme Court justices should be respected. (Can't countenance Roberts' lying, tho'.) So, if Kagan's the president's choice, I'm prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt and support the nomination.

But, quite frankly, I shouldn't have to doubt (and here, the next two links are via Greenwald.) As the NYT editorial page well put it: "President Obama may know that his new nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, shares his thinking on the multitude of issues that face the court and the nation, but the public knows nothing of the kind. Whether by ambitious design or by habit of mind, Ms. Kagan has spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view."

So, sure, I guess it's entirely possible Kagan is a secret superprogressive of the Leonard Cohen type. ("They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.") But there's another explanation that's more likely. And, loath as I am to agree with David Brooks, his column today echoes almost exactly what I was thinking:

"Kagan has apparently wanted to be a judge or justice since adolescence (she posed in judicial robes for her high school yearbook.) There was a brief period, in her early 20s, when she expressed opinions on legal and political matters. But that seems to have ended pretty quickly. She has become a legal scholar without the interest scholars normally have in the contest of ideas. She's shown relatively little interest in coming up with new theories or influencing public debate. Her publication record is scant and carefully nonideological...What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess."

That's my rub too, and it dovetails with larger problems I have with DC political culture. More often than not, the people who tend to succeed here are the ones who keep their head down, play the DC game, stay resolutely non-ideological and unobtrusive in their opinions. never go out on a limb, never say or do anything that could hurt their bid to be a Big (or Bigger) Shot down the road. (Hence, the whole phenomenon of The Village.)The problem is, these plodding, risk-averse careerist types are exactly the type of people you don't want making decisions in the end, because they will invariably lead to the plodding, risk-averse and too-often rudderless politics of the lowest common denominator.

I'm really hoping the future Justice Kagan isn't another example of this troubling trend, because as I said when Stevens retired: "The Court needs a strong and unabashed liberal conscience right now. What it emphatically does not need is another centrist technocrat that will help push the Court ever further to the right" But, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in Mother Night, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." And when someone spends decades being so careful and circumspect in the face of so many obvious injustices, both by recent administrations and in the world at large...well, I really have to wonder about their judgment.

Update: Having said all that, this recently unearthed 1996 internal campaign finance reform memo to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, on which Kagan is one of six signers, suggests she is in fact on the right side of the campaign finance reform issue: "It is unfortunately true that almost any meaningful campaign finance reform proposal raises unconstitutional issues and will provoke legal challenge. This is inevitable in light of the Supreme Court's view -- which we believe to be mistaken in many cases -- that money is speech and attempts to limit the influence of money on our political system therefore raises First Amendment problems. We think...the Court should reexamine its premise that the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment always entails a right to throw money at the political system." So that's a big check-mark in my book -- Unfortunately, other Clinton-era memos are less promising.

"'This is the earliest that the Center has ever offered an estimate,' Krumholz said. 'As election observers across the political spectrum work to assess the impact of Citizens United, this prediction offers a solid baseline to compare new spending levels against.'" Before even taking the torrents of campaign cash expected in the wake of the Citizens United decision into consideration, the Center of Responsive Politics estimates that the 2010 midterms will cost over $3.7 billion. (FWIW, the year 2006 clocked in at $2.85 billion.) Sigh...fasten your seat belts -- It's going to be a bumpy ride.

"When the Chief Judge joined in the argument about the continuing vitality of the corruption rationale for campaign finance restraints, he flatly accused Kolker of evading the Citizens United ruling. "I'm not hearing you address Citizens United," Sentelle said. And Judge Thomas B. Griffith chimed in: "You're trying to avoid Citizens United. This is a new world: corruption means a lot less than it did before.'"

Hey, you said it, Judge. According to the good folks at SCOTUSblog, the doors to unfettered campaign cash are open in a big way in the minds of the DC District Court after Citizens United: "From the opening moment of the 65-minute hearing, most of the nine judges on the en banc Court treated the Supreme Court's ruling...as the beginning, not the end, of expansion of those freedoms. When an FEC lawyer tried to bring up, and rely on, older precedents, he was reminded repeatedly that those came before Citizens United."

President Obama's stern words about the decision in his State of the Union address may have induced Justice Alito to expose himself as a partisan hack, but it seems, alas, that the Justice and his four conservative contemporaries will have the last laugh.

"The Chamber spent much of its money in 2009 on campaigns that worked -- it scared the Senate away from considering a version of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation, and an argument can be made that its cutting ads on health care (with money taken from some insurance companies) helped to undercut support for the legislation." You think? In a shape-of-things-to-come moment even before Citizens United goes into effect, the Chamber of Commerce outspent both political parties in 2009.

"According to The Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its national subsidiaries spent $144.5 million in 2009, far more than the RNC and more than double the expenditures by the DNC." But corporate spending isn't a problem or anything.

"In a new national poll, 65 percent of Americans say they disagree with the 5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to spend without limits on ads in political campaigns." And yet hope remains while the company is true: A new poll finds Americans across the board are unhappy with the court's ruling in Citizens United.

"The Reid poll found little difference in partisan attitudes...Sixty-six percent of Democrats either "moderately" or "strongly" disagreed with the ruling, but so did 63 percent of Republicans. A whopping 72 percent of Independents disagreed with the Supremes' decision." One wonders how those numbers might've moved if we started using Citizen United's full name to discuss this case...

You stay classy, GOP. And folks thought "teabagger" was ugly.

"Debate on the question of money and politics has been percolating within the ACLU for years, long before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United. 'It is difficult to think of an issue that has generated more internal controversy,' an internal ACLU memo states."

To its credit and as a result of the Citizens United decision (which the organization has previously lawyered and lobbied for), the ACLU convenes a weekend summit to discuss its campaign finance reform position. "'The ACLU's version of democracy is from the ground-up,' one civil rights lawyer, David Gans, told the ACLU's board, which was assembled downtown at One New York Plaza. 'Now Exxon Mobil can spend 2% of its money and blow that all up.'"

Here's hoping the reformers win the day -- or walk out CIO-style if they don't. Imho, the stance that unlimited corporate funding of our elections is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment has always been the Achilles' heel of an otherwise superb organization. I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, their reasoning relies on two unfortunate bugs in the legal code -- corporate personhood and the conflation of money with speech -- that they too often deem fundamental First Amendment principles. I would argue they're not.

For why the former -- corporate personhood -- has obvious problems, just read Justice Stevens' dissent from Thursday:

"The basic premise underlying the Court's ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker's identity, including its 'identity; as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law....

Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure,and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races."

For the latter -- the ruinous conflation of money and speech in Buckley v. Valeo -- check out Stevens' concurrence in Nixon v. Shrink Government Pact (2000), where he says how he'd come down if Buckley were reopened:

"In response to [Justice Kennedy's] call for a new beginning, therefore, I make one simple point. Money is property; it is not speech.

Speech has the power to inspire volunteers to perform a multitude of tasks on a campaign trail, on a battleground, or even on a football field. Money, meanwhile, has the power to pay hired laborers to perform the same tasks. It does not follow, however, that the First Amendment provides the same measure of protection to the use of money to accomplish such goals as it provides to the use of ideas to achieve the same results...

Telling a grandmother that she may not use her own property to provide shelter to a grandchild -- or to hire mercenaries to work in that grandchild's campaign for public office -- raises important constitutional concerns that are unrelated to the First Amendment."

(See also Byron White's concurrence in part in Buckley, which argues that "[n]othing in the First Amendment stands in the way of " campaign finance limits.)

But somewhere along the line and for whatever reason, the ACLU latched on to both of these unwise shibboleths, and have since been arguing that corporate personhood and the idea of money as speech are both enshrined in the First Amendment. Uh...really?

To see what kind of damage these two bogus ideas have wrought, one need only to go over to Salon and read through Glenn Greenwald's ugly meltdown on Citzens United the past few days. As anyone who visits GitM regularly knows, I link to Greenwald pretty much constantly. On a host of issues, from Obama's terrible record on civil liberties to the broken-down state of our journalism, he's been remarkably on point, and one of my favorite columnists to read. I used to wonder if there was anything I disagreed with him on. Well, it turns out, there is. And, apparently, I'm a "partisan hack" for thinking different.

For the Cliff Notes version of this whole conversation, I wrote up a snarky summation of it here yesterday, well after things had gone south. But, basically, Glenn -- on "homework assignment" -- argued on Friday that, all the negative consequences that will ensue aside, the Majority in Citizen's United decided the case correctly, that this was a victory for the first amendment, and that people who disagree with their decision are practicing "outcome-based law." (He also made the dubious and unprovable assertion that things can't get any worse anyway. Really? We'll see.)

Well, this assessment did not sit right with a lot of people. Some questioned his reading of the case. Others pointed out that law is always outcome-based, even the Majority's ruling in Citizens. (The concerned outcome for Justice Kennedy here is that blogs might get banned someday, somehow, if this ruling isn't made. I'll take my chances.) And, others, such as myself, questioned these two principles -- corporations are people, money is speech -- that the ruling was based on.

Well, suffice to say, Greenwald did not take criticism well. He adamantly refused to engage either notion -- money isn't speech, corporations aren't people -- as having any merit whatsoever, eventually trying to write off both with some dubious 1L hypotheticals. (All were answered to his disadvantage, several times over.) He went on to ridicule the folks who disagreed with him in a "check out the Big Brain on me" kinda way. (He argued his lawyerly creds just means he knows better.) He ignored Stevens' actual dissent throughout. And he accused folks of being just like Dubya on torture for deigning to disagree with him on the decision.

This embarrassing conceit -- those with disagree with me are Dubyaites, end of story -- formed the extraordinarily condescending introduction of Greenwald's follow-up to his first post. Still ignoring the legitimate criticisms people were making of the two assertions above -- money=speech and corporations=people, Glenn instead pulled one line from Justice Stevens' ninety pages of dissent to argue that all nine Justices agreed with both of these propositions. (This even though both Ginsburg and Sotomayor questioned the corporate personhood idea in oral arguments, and that Stevens explicitly said he did not agree with the money=speech proposition in Nixon v. Shrink, an argument Glenn would not touch.) As it turns out, the one line Glenn pulled from Stevens' dissent proved neither assertion. Nonetheless, he returned to his shell, refusing to even consider the notion that "money=speech" or "corporations=people" might be lousy interpretations or legal accidents, or that they aren't necessarily covered by the First Amendment.

When I shared the above ACLU story this morning, Greenwald blew another gasket:

The ACLU has a long history of standing up to and defying people [like] you: those who pretend to believe in the Constitution and civil liberties only when it can be used as a weapon to advance your partisan and political agenda.

If they didn't reverse themselves on the First Amendment rights of Nazis in the wake of huge numbers of people like you (those who only believe in the Constitution when it suits them) cutting off funding and leaving the organization, I highly doubt they will do so now....

But what has made the ACLU such an important and unique organization is that they have stood their ground on principle and resisted the efforts of people like you to turn it into a partisan tool rather than an organization devoted to the Constitution."

I guess he figured I'd forget what "people like me" means from paragraph to paragraph. And, yes, y'all, I've been writing on politics and progressivism here for ten years because I've always wanted to subvert the Constitution to my own ends. And I would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that nasty Greenwald!

Anyway, when I then reminded Greenwald that people of principle can disagree on these issues, and that it may even be possible that the ACLU reformers might even be the right ones in this story, that's when I got called an Orwellian partisan hack once more. (FWIW, here's my kissoff. I particularly like "paddock of principle and certitude.")

Throughout this whole back-and-forth, there was not even the remotest possibility that any other interpretation on these two questions had merit for Greenwald: Corporations have first amendment rights. Money is speech. Both are obviously enshrined in the First Amendment. And arguing anything else is ridiculous and deserving of scorn (even if Supreme Court justices have argued differently in the past, including as recently as Thursday.) So let it be written, so let it be done.

Uh...really? Who knows...perhaps it's a lawyer thing. Nonetheless, this myopic, bullish way of thinking -- I hold the only correct possible interpretation of the law, and you're either with me or you're with the Dubyaites -- isn't very satisfying on either personal or argumentative grounds. And Greenwald's constant doubling down on his original argument, even as more and more holes were poked in it by various responders, makes me question not only his temperament but his writing in general. He usually provides a valuable public service, no doubt, but he seems to have bought into his own hype as an Incorruptible Defender of Liberty. If you can't think outside of yourself once in awhile, or find some way to weigh arguments you may not necessarily agree with without deeming them unprincipled, you're really not much use to anyone.

Update: Looks like Greenwald addressed this topic one more time this morning. Here's what he said:

"'Money is not speech' is an idiot bumper sticker slogan, not a meaningful argument which resolves anything. 'Corporations have no constitutional rights' is such an extreme and dangerous position (it endorses the constitutionality of the FBI's searching whatever corporate offices they want and seizing all corporate documents with no search warrants or probable cause, or the Congress' imposing $10 million fines on corporations every time they criticize the government, among other things) that it's frivolous in the extreme. Despite that, I spent substantial time all weekend addressing and responding to those frivolous bumper sticker slogans."

So there you have it. An "idiot bumper sticker slogan"...repeated verbatim by Justice Stevens in 2000. (And, for what it's worth, Greenwald referred to civil rights lawyer David Kairys' piece on these two questions, linked several times above, as "stupid and ill-informed.") Class act, Glenn.

"The Court today rejects a century of history when it treats the distinction between corporate and individual campaign spending as an invidious novelty born of Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U. S. 652 (1990). Relying largely on individual dissenting opinions, the majority blazes through our precedents, overruling or disavowing a body of case law...The Court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution."

Well, it was a nice republic while it lasted. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court finally hands down its Citzens United verdict, and it is ugly. [Full Text] Basically, the distinction between corporations and individuals has been erased, and, by the already dubious proposition that money is speech, unlimited corporate expenditures in campaigns is now just good, old-fashioned government. Welcome to the new Lochner era, y'all.

By the way, this is a much, much bigger deal than Scott Brown or the effing Edwards baby. Not that you'd know that from watching the news right now.

Update: More reactions:

Fred Wertheimer, Democracy 21: "Today's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case is a disaster for the American people and a dark day for the Supreme Court...With a stroke of the pen, five Justices wiped out a century of American history devoted to preventing corporate corruption of our democracy."

Bob Edgar, Common Cause: "The Roberts Court today made a bad situation worse. This decision allows Wall Street to tap its vast corporate profits to drown out the voice of the public in our democracy. The path from here is clear: Congress must free itself from Wall Street's grip so Main Street can finally get a fair shake."

Robert Weissman, Public Citizen: "Shed a tear for our democracy...Money from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the policy making process in Washington, state capitals and city halls. Today, the Supreme Court tells these corporate giants that they have a constitutional right to trample our democracy."

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI): "[T]his decision was a terrible mistake. Presented with a relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was president. Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns. Just six years ago, the Court said that the prohibition on corporations and unions dipping into their treasuries to influence campaigns was 'firmly embedded in our law.' Yet this Court has just upended that prohibition, and a century's worth of campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in government. The American people will pay dearly for this decision when, more than ever, their voices are drowned out by corporate spending in our federal elections."

President Obama: "With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington--while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less."

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick: "Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is 'to confuse metaphor with reality.' Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good."

"If Republicans were wondering how their 2012 presidential candidate is going to compete against President Obama's $600 million fundraising juggernaut, the Supreme Court seems poised to provide an answer: unlimited corporate spending supporting the Republican candidate, or attacking Obama." With Justice Sotomayor aboard, the Supreme Court holds a special session today to re-hear arguments in Citizens United v. F.E.C.

And, as Slate's Richard Hasen explains, the projected outcome does not look good for McCain-Feingold or advocates of campaign finance reform. "If Roberts or Alito were ready to go the narrow route again in Citizens United, however, there would have been no reason to set the case for reargument explicitly asking the parties to brief the constitutional question, and certainly no reason to rush the case to September so it can be decided before the 2010 election season goes into full swing...Expect the floodgates to open, and the money to flow freely, as early as next year."