Study Documents Corporate Takeover Of Supreme Court

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http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/26/cac-corporate-court/


In an unfortunate interview with Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr, Justice Stephen Breyer rejected the notion that the Roberts Court is unusually pro-corporate because business interest “have always done pretty well.” Yet a new empirical study by the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center demonstrates that Breyer is mistaken. The study compares the right-wing Chamber of Commerce’s win-rate since Justice Alito joined the Court in January of 2006 to their win-rate twenty-five years ago, and the results are clear and undeniable:

-snip of chart-

If anything, this chart understates just how successful the Chamber’s powerful corporate lobby has been in stacking the Court with right-wing justices. The study also examines each individual justices’ votes, and finds that fully five of today’s justices — a majority of the Court’s members — are significantly more pro-corporate than the most pro-corporate member of the Court in the early 1980s (the study did not include the Court’s two newest members because of an insufficiently large data sample):

-snip of chart and text-

Significantly, this ideological shift in favor of corporations appears to be driven entirely by the Court’s conservative members. While a member of the Court’s more moderate bloc still votes with the Chamber 43% of the time — a rate that is comparable with conservative Justice William Rehnquist’s votes in the early 1980s — the five conservatives have become consistent votes for the Chamber’s position. In other words, left-leaning justices have largely stood still, while the Court’s conservatives sprinted into the arms of corporate America.

And there can be no doubt that the nation has suffered dearly because this corporate capture of the judiciary. In just the last few years, right-wing justices have immunized powerful corporate interest groups from campaign finance law, from laws intended to protect the environment, and from laws intended to protect women and older Americans in the workplace.

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this has got to change. impeach, impeach.

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