Thanks to the Roberts Court, Corporations Have More Constitutional Rights Than Actual People

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/179932/thanks-roberts-court-corporations-have-more-constitutional-rights-actual-people



The big media talk a lot about stalemate in Congress, but they are missing the real story. While representative democracy is dysfunctional, the Supreme Court has taken over with its own reactionary power grab. In case after case, the court’s right-wing majority is making its own law—expanding the power of corporations and the very wealthy, while making it harder for ordinary citizens to fight back.

Worst of all, the Roberts Court is trying to permanently inhibit the federal government’s ability to help people cope with the country’s vast social and economic disorders.

This is not a theoretical complaint. Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative Republican Court is building a barbed wire fence around the federal government—creating constitutional obstacles to progressive legislation in ways that resemble the Supreme Court’s notorious Lochner decision of 1905. That case held that property rights prevail over people and the common good.

For more than thirty years, the conservative Justices used that twisted precedent to invalidate more than 200 state and federal laws on major social and economic concerns like child labor, the minimum wage, bank regulation and union organizing. New Deal reformers were stymied by Lochner at first, and they only managed to overturn it in 1937 and only then when FDR mobilized a take-no-prisoners campaign to reform the Supreme Court by weakening its unaccountable power.

[KansDem]

1. I wish I could talk with Mr. Dunphy...

He was my high-school social-studies teacher.

He once said in class that you could criticize the executive and legislative branches of government. They were, after all, elected politicians whose views are not shared by all Americans. But you should not criticize the judicial branch as the justices were "above politics." They were on the Supreme Court due to their wisdom and scholarship, and not influenced by political swaying. Their duty was to interpret the Constitution.

That was 1970, and I remember that lecture like I heard it yesterday.

But, in the wake of Bush v. Gore, "Citizens United," and SC justices appearing at right-wing fundraisers, as well as the actions describe in the article, I wonder what he would say today.

[Leme]

2. my guesson what Mr. Dunphy would say, short version

oops

[ladjf]

3. Roberts is attempting to destroy the American Government and replace it with dominion-ism. nt