Re: Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis Ordered Released From Jail
Are you trying to confuse the issue with a bunch of lawyer like diversion? Of course it's not surprising they'd cite Citizens United, and I in fact said they cited Citizens United in overturning a century of Montana law. What was your point?
Obviously the Court decided the Montana case you cited
after Citizens United, or it could not have referred to that decision. So what it held about that state law offers no support whatever for your assertion that the Supreme Court overruled "a century of state and federal limits on campaign spending
in Citizens United." That is false. The Court did no such thing in the Citizens United decision. As it noted there,
"[Not] until 1947 did Congress first prohibit independent expenditures by corporations and labor unions . . . For almost three decades thereafter, the Court did not reach the question whether restrictions on corporate and union expenditures are constitutional."
In Citizens United, the Court returned to a principle it had strongly suggested in a mid-1970's decision, Buckley v. Valeo, and had directly stated two years later in First Nat'l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti: That the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker’s corporate identity. In 1990, the Court had departed from that view in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and it had held to Austin in a following decision, McConnell. In Citizens United, the majority overruled Austin and part of McConnell, and returned to its earlier position:
"We return to the principle established in Buckley and Bellotti that the Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity. No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.
For the record, as you know, the SC didn't just rule that corporations were protected by the 1st Amendment . . . I'll quote the majority opinion:
“independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.”
I agree. The Buckley Court had distinguished between
direct contributions, which it upheld limits on to prevent corruption, or the appearance of it, and
independent expenditures, which it found had a "substantially diminished potential for abuse." The Court in Citizens United agreed with this earlier view, saying that "Limits on independent expenditures, such as §441b, have a chilling effect extending well beyond the Government’s interest in preventing quid pro quo corruption. The anticorruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech here in question."
It's got to be the all time "most detached from actual reality" statement to ever be uttered by a SC justice.
I don't know which justice you mean. Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United, which is unusually complex and difficult. It's hard reading, so I am not surprised that like most people who just
know how malignant it is, you have never read it attentively enough to understand it. Kennedy has shown in that and other cases that he knows how to write decisions that require precise, intricate reasoning. It's exactly the fact he has often shown how clearly he can think and apply constitutional law that makes the kind of vague, mystical gobbledygook he was guilty of in writing about abortion and homosexual issues in Casey, Lawrence, Windsor, and now Obergefell so damned frustrating.
Maybe you don't value the freedom of speech as highly as the majority in Citizens United and I do. Or maybe you just don't understand the free speech issue involved.
