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Montana State Supreme Court Triggers Another Citizens United Fight
enlightenedbum
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Registered User regular
This is surely going to federal court and eventually SCOTUS will overturn it, but in the meantime it's kind of awesome. Montana has this Supreme Court and Brian Schweitzer: who knew?
A Colorado corporation wanted to use Citizens United to overturn a century old law prohibiting direct corporate spending on elections. Which isn't quite what Citizens United did, but it's pretty damn close. They sued, it go to the state Supreme Court and the ruling came down this week. They ruled to uphold the law and told SCOTUS to fuck off in the process.
That's from the dissent that voted to overturn the law based on Citizens United:
The rest of it is just as good.
A Colorado corporation wanted to use Citizens United to overturn a century old law prohibiting direct corporate spending on elections. Which isn't quite what Citizens United did, but it's pretty damn close. They sued, it go to the state Supreme Court and the ruling came down this week. They ruled to uphold the law and told SCOTUS to fuck off in the process.
For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins: the transition is seamless and overlapping.”
...
“It should be noted that the Montana Corrupt Practices Act was adopted in 1912 at a time when the country’s focus was on preventing political corruption, not on protecting corporate influence
...
Nelson said independent expenditures by corporations in political campaigns—where political players are not supposed to coordinate their actions with candidate campaigns—absolutely were noticed and influenced the lawmaking process. “In the real world of politics,” he wrote, “the “quid pro quo” of both direct contributions to candidates and independent expenditures on their behalf is loyalty. And, in practical effect, experience teaches us that money corrupts, and enough of it corrupts absolutely.”
Nelson closed by slamming the legal theory of corporate personhood—that corporations, because they are run and owned by people, should have the same constitutional freedoms as individuals under the Bill of Rights. Corporatist judges, such as the Roberts Court, believe that corporations and people are indistinguishable under the law. In contrast, constitutional conservatives know very well that the framers of the U.S. Constitution distrusted large economic enterprises and drafted a document to protect individual businessmen, farmers and tradespeople from economic exploitation.
“While I recognize that this doctrine is firmly entrenched in law,” Nelson began, “I find the concept entirely offensive. Corporations are artificial creatures of law. As such, they should enjoy only those powers—not constitutional rights, but legislatively-conferred powers—that are concomitant with their legitimate function, that being limited liability investment vehicles for business. Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people—human beings—to share fundamental natural rights with soulless creations of government. Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency, and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.”
That's from the dissent that voted to overturn the law based on Citizens United:
“the [U.S.] Supreme Court has spoken. It has interpreted the protections of the First Amendment vis-a-vis corporate political speech. Agree with its decision or not, Montana’s judiciary and elected officers are bound to accept and enforce the [U.S.] Supreme Court’s ruling…”
The rest of it is just as good.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
enlightenedbum on
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the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Maybe we should stop making so many laws that force corporations to care more about politics than anything else. Or, as one executive put it, if corporate donations are so wrong, then politicians need to quit coming around begging for them so often.
Government needs to keep corporations in check, no-one else will.
That's a big reason why the system is broken. Both need the other to survive.
It's possible to be against Citizens United without thinking corporations are evil.
Well, to use a Montana example, they keep trying to repeal the initiative passed by Montana voters (twice!) to ban cyanide use in gold mining because it makes drinking water... exciting. I'm not sure exactly what you call that, but it's not like profits are the things being questioned here.
But Yar wants to build his strawmen, dammit!
Tradition. Which state do you think sent the first woman to Congress?
Of course, we have our own chucklefucks. Like the Libertarian who turned himself blue, or the Teaper that argued against DUI laws on the floor of the State Legislature.
Is this a joke?
Montana is the only state that bans cyanide leaching. It's the only economical gold mining process in use. It doesn't harm drinking water or anything. I'd wager that a politician rode to power on fear-mongering the word "cyanide," and now a whole crop of politicians are asking for handouts from the mining industry to make this unusual ban go away.
Which is precisely the kind of bullshit ignorance our population ends up with when you allow the government to censor one side of the discussion.
www.nwmtgoldprospectors.com/downloads/cyanide.pdf
See, that's what you call "Evil".
Like, 2-dimensional dime-store political thrillers are written on these premises because that kind of thing is so obviously evil, you don't even need to bother explaining why the reader should be supporting the other side because it's so damn obviously evil.
How did Montana tell SCOTUS to fuck off?
The opinion goes into detail about the specific ways in which their ruling complies with the standards laid out in CU. It attempts to show that the state law meets the strict scrutiny standards of being "narrowly tailored" and representing a "compelling interest" on behalf of the state, as prescribed by SCOTUS, which justify the restriction of speech.
It then goes on to state that Montana will comply with whatever ruling SCOTUS hands down, which is about as far from "Fuck off, SCOTUS!" as one can get.
Alternet's title is misleading. The Montana court isn't saying CU doesn't apply in Montana, it's saying that the Montana law is in compliance with CU.
Taxation isn't perfect, but when bills need transparency they aren't at the top of my priorities.
Cyanide shouldn't be anywhere near drinking water (animals or humans) ever.
There are some thing's you just don't do. That's one of them.
You're hurting your argument by linking to an article made by "Gold Prospectors". Get a link to an article by a reliable source with no political or financial tie then I'll take it seriously.
I think what you mean to say is that cyanide leaching CAN be performed in such a way as to avoid contaminating local water sources, not that it is an automatically safe process.
The problem posed therein is that corporations exist to maximize shareholder value, and make cost/benefit decisions accordingly, in a way that most human beings acting in a non-corporate context simply don't do. So, if a corporation determined that it would be more cost-effective to cut safety corners in performing cyanide leaching, even factoring in potential lawsuits, the corporation probably will do so. I think a state legislature, recognizing this inherent danger, has the right to decide to stop the process before it goes anywhere.
As someone who lives in Montana and likes having clean water to drink, would you kindly keep your beak shut about something you know little about? I especially find the insinuation that we're all ignorant, when you have no idea how everything went down, especially infuriating. There were leaching pits so toxic, migratory waterfowl landing on them would be killed within moments. Ever seen a goose dissolve?
I have to find a picture of the Berkley Pit, though it's much more impressive and depressing in person. And it's not even the worst of the pits.
Edit: Info on why we banned cyanide leaching :
http://meic.org/mining/hardrock-mining/cyanide_mining
We're using "owned" as slang rather than in the literal sense. Basically, when someone hostile to regulation and friendly to the industry takes office, they just stuff the place with pro-industry appointees. It doesn't help that most of the people with the knowledge about what a particular industry is doing comes from that industry, so there's a revolving door where people leave the industry to go into regulatory bodies for a few years, then jump back into private industry for much more money.
Okay, thanks.
EDIT: Oh. Oh god. I just read this in the Wikipedia entry for the Berkley Pit:
The pit is currently a tourist attraction, with an adjacent gift shop. A $2 admission fee is charged to go out on the viewing platform.
Yup. I'll leave it to you to determine what that says about Butte. But I think the geese were killed at another pond - the Pit is relatively tame compared to others in the state.
I poked around in the citations, too.
From Yar's link:
One of these links passes the smell test. The other smells like bullshit.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And then you have people bitching about regulation when it's exactly that type of behavior which necessitates some form of regulation. How would you prevent mining companies from pulling off the BS that was described above? By regulating their behavior and holding them accountable (e.g., mandating accounts be funded to pay out in case of "environmental disaster", etc. etc. etc.).
Which is the brilliance of the move. The ruling is meant to define the borders of CU in a manner that contains it. Furthermore, it now puts the Roberts Court in the position of either handing that definition over to the MT Supremes, or reopening the CU can of worms.
lolwut
To test your hypothesis of cyanide being harmless and 'cyandide' just being a political buzzword, would you be willing to consume a rather dilute glass of cyanide / water solution?
But it doesn't force the re-opening of the entire can of CU worms. SCOTUS can easily rule that Montana's law doesn't meet the CU-prescribed standard, and that's it. No re-examining of whether corporations are people, or whether money is speech, and all that.
It wouldn't require the re-arguing of the basic issues of CU - as far as the Court is concerned, those issues are settled. Barring some change of heart by one or more justices, the role of CU's precedent will be to serve as the arbiter of new cases, not to be re-evaluated constantly itself.
The same way that none of the following cases:
- Griffin vs Prince Edward County
- Lee vs Johnson
- Heart of Atlanta vs US
- Boynton vs Virginia
required a re-arguing of the basic issues the Court decided in Brown vs Board, regarding segregation and the 14th Amendment. They're all built off of the Court's basic anti-segregation precedent established in Brown, regardless of the myriad ways in which different state and private entities tried to "contain" the Brown decision.
which it might, given the furore the decision sparked and the closeness of the decision to begin with
There's also the fact that there's more going on here than just the ruling. Let's start with everyone's favorite ethics-challenged justice, Clarence Thomas. I think we can all agree that, with all that's come out about him and his wife in the past year, he cannot defend sitting on any case involving Citizens United. If he does choose not to recuse his corrupt ass, Roberts can get a 5-4 ruling upholding CU as it stands. But, it will pretty much confirm the sense that the current court is a corrupt joke, and weaken its legitimacy.
So what, you say - Roberts just gets Thomas to ride the legal pines. The problem is that if he does that, he just loses any chance to control the direction of the case. With Thomas recused, it's now a 4-4 split at best, meaning the new constraints on Citizens United are upheld. And that's if Kennedy keeps on his current side - considering all the flak he;'s taken, he may very well decide to try to redeem himself. And if he does, it goes to 5-3 against, putting the anti-CU side in the driver's seat.
In short, the Treasure State just put Roberts in one hell of a pickle. He doesn't have any good options - just a lot of bad ones.
Like he gives a shit! He's got a cushy job for life and this Congress will never be able to do anything about it!
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
Thomas is not going to recuse himself, end of story.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Profits. It isn't deadly to profits. And who cares about that other thing? Life? Pfft. Profits.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
We've reached Poe's Singularity. If you wish to stay sane then if it looks funny to you, treat it like a joke and laugh at it. The other option is far, far too depressing.
He has on a number of occasions gotten a 6-3 so he could get an opinion more in line with his views while also having more legitimacy.