Matt Bai of WorldNet Daily, in the intro of a piece that tries to separate fact from self-indulgent liberal fiction in re the Citizens United case’s impact on politics.
Libs, of course, have been telling themselves and (mostly) everyone else that Citizens United completely swept away the foundations of democracy.
As a matter of political strategy, this is a useful story to tell, appealing to liberals and independent voters who aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about the administration but who are concerned about societal inequality, which is why President Obama has made it a rallying cry almost from the moment the Citizens United ruling was made. But if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on with politics and money, the accepted narrative around Citizens United is, at best, overly simplistic. And in some respects, it’s just plain wrong.
Read the whole thing. And pass it on to your liberal and propaganda-addled (ptr) friends.
UPDATE: Whoops – it wasn’t in WorldNet Daily. The piece appears in that noted conservative tool, the NYTimes.
I regret the confusion.
UPDATE 2: Bai, not Sai.
That was an interesting decision. Needless to say, I found Kennedy’s majority opinion more convincing than Stevens’ dissent.
Kennedy’s opinion stuck close to what the law said. Stevens’ opinion (like Ginsberg’s in Ledbetter vs Goodyear) depended on speculations about the kind of society we wanted to be. Ho hum. Thought that was the job of elected legislators in this country.
What I found mind-boggling about Stevens’ dissent was his apparent belief that constitution treats political speech and non-political speech identically. Stevens seems to think that because the courts have upheld the right of the state to regulate some speech — fighting words, for example — it has the right to regulate all speech. This is breathtakingly stupid. Equally stupid is his odd notion that the political class is somehow representing the Will of the People, and not its own, when it uses its power to regulate the ways in which it may be spoken about.
Congress does not fear “corporate money”. Big corporations are easily co-opted. Congress fears the People. It is their voice that congress fears, because it threatens the cozy relationship between the members of the political class and their pet for-profit and non-profit corporations.
“I believe there ought to be limits because the First Amendment is not absolute. No amendment is absolute,” Chuck “Shyster” Schumer said on the Senate floor.