Citizens United: Sup. Ct. Rules Money Is Political Speech

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Citizens United: Sup. Ct. Rules Money Is Political Speech

Post by roxybeast » January 22nd, 2010, 3:55 am

<center>Citizens United v. F.E.C.:
The Supreme Court Effectively Rules That Money Is Political Speech

by Beth Isbell, Jan. 21, 2010
</center>

I've been talking with friends on-line about the meaning & impact of yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC. As y'all know, I'm a civil rights lawyer. I think the biggest problem with this decision isn't necessarily the part that's getting all the hype, it's implicit ruling & message that money is protected political speech!

On the corporation = person issue: "If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck & looks like a duck, it must be a duck!" When I last checked I didn't think corporations walk, talk or look like real people, but hey, the conservative majority on our Sup. Court sure do! "We the People" = We the Corporations! Lovely, welcome to the nightmare of political spending hell!
The law itself was not the problem here; the statutory and case law, and the Constitution itself, very much supported the opposite outcome. ... Today's ruling is the result of a long-term conservative plan to change the Court to serve corporations' interests." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-kend ... 31989.html
In this case, it was the "conservative" judges who claimed to be "strict constructionists" that threw aside long-standing court precedents to reach this awful result. Don't be fooled, this is the result of Republican strategy to flood the Court with their hand-picked "conservative" "strict-constructionist" appointees. The four liberal/moderates on the Court - Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg & Sotomayor - all dissented and strongly objected to this abomination!

Consider this - in 2008, Obama & McCain together spent about $1 billion on their campaigns and the combined total of all campaign spending was just over $5 billion ... Exxon-Mobil has $45 billion in profits that year, the four largest Wall Street banks just paid out almost $100 billion in 2009 bonuses. Now if they just put a sliver of profits/bonuses into political advertising & PAC filtered campaign contributions, they can purchase unfathomable power & influence. WOW! Worse yet, a lot of US corporations are now foreign owned.

This decision effectively means that political speech is not "free" anymore ...
it is now available to the highest bidder!

As another friend of mine said, "now is the time of all times that we should be more conscience of our spending habits and stop throwing our money at these monolithic, multi-billion dollar, multi-national banks & corporations!!!" I couldn't agree more.

If as the conservatives on the Supreme Court seem to think money is now equivalent to political speech, let's send these behemoths a message in a language they understand!

Peace,
Beth Isbell

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Post by roxybeast » January 22nd, 2010, 11:25 pm

Here's another thought that clearly demonstrates what this ruling means ...

It's not like the owner or individual board members or individual managers or individual shareholders of corporations could not have expressed that very same political speech or opinion as individual persons. So the only real purpose of this decision is to allow corporations (and unions) a "multiplier" effect - they can now spend an unlimited amount of corporate resources to multiply the loudness and therefore the effect of their typically profit driven opinion. Thus, this opinion really isn't about preventing censorship or allowing any "new" message that was somehow being stifled, it is about one thing pure & simple: MONEY!

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Post by roxybeast » January 26th, 2010, 7:12 pm

I never ever want to hear another Republican, tea bagger, wingnut or conservative, tell me how their side believes in following legal precedent & opposes judicial activism!
After 34 Years, a Plainspoken Justice Gets Louder
By ADAM LIPTAK

New York Times, Sidebar, January 26, 2010

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court announced its big campaign finance decision at 10 in the morning last Thursday. By 10:30 a.m., after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had offered a brisk summary of the majority opinion and Justice John Paul Stevens labored through a 20-minute rebuttal, a sort of twilight had settled over the courtroom.

It seemed the Stevens era was ending.

Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 in April, joined the court in 1975 and is the longest-serving current justice by more than a decade. He has given signals that he intends to retire at the end of this term, and his dissent on Thursday was shot through with disappointment, frustration and uncharacteristic sarcasm.

He seemed weary, and more than once he stumbled over and mispronounced ordinary words in the lawyer’s lexicon — corruption, corporation, allegation. Sometimes he would take a second or third run at the word, sometimes not.

But there was no mistaking his basic message. “The rule announced today — that Congress must treat corporations exactly like human speakers in the political realm — represents a radical change in the law,” he said from the bench. “The court’s decision is at war with the views of generations of Americans.”

That was the plainspoken style of the last years of Justice Stevens’s tenure. In cases involving prisoners held without charge at Guantánamo Bay and the mentally retarded on death row, his version of American justice was propelled by common sense and moral clarity, and it commanded a majority.

He was on the short end of the 2008 decision finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms, and he had mixed success in fighting what he saw as illegitimate justifications for discrimination against African-Americans, women and homosexuals.

Justice Stevens is the leader of the court’s liberal wing, and its three other members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — all joined his 90-page dissent. They must have been tempted to write separately, as the case was bristling with issues of particular interest to all of them. Instead, they allowed the spotlight to shine solely on Justice Stevens.

There was no such solidarity among the conservatives. Though Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. all joined Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion on its main point, three of them added separate concurrences.

In his dissent, Justice Stevens said no principle required overruling two major campaign finance precedents. “The only relevant thing that has changed since” those decisions, he wrote, “is the composition of this court.”

In Justice Stevens’s early years on the court, his views often seemed idiosyncratic, and he would often write separate opinions joined by no other justice. Over the years, though, he has emerged as a master tactician, and he came to use his seniority to great advantage. The senior justice in the majority has the power to assign the majority opinion, and Justice Stevens used that power with patience and skill.

This term, though, Justice Stevens has been more of a loner. Thursday’s decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was only the 10th signed decision of the term. In the previous nine, Justice Stevens wrote separately and only for himself three times. On a fourth occasion, he was joined only by Justice Kennedy.

A theme ran through these recent opinions: that the Supreme Court had lost touch with fundamental notions of fair play. In two of the cases, Justice Stevens lashed out at the court’s failure to condemn what he called shoddy work by defense lawyers in death penalty cases.

On Wednesday, in Wood v. Allen, Justice Stevens dissented from a majority decision that said a lawyer fresh out of law school had made a reasonable strategic choice in not pursuing evidence that his client was mentally retarded.

“A decision cannot be fairly characterized as ‘strategic’ unless it is a conscious choice between two legitimate and rational alternatives,” Justice Stevens wrote. “It must be borne of deliberation and not happenstance, inattention or neglect.”

He made a similar point this month in a second capital case, Smith v.
Spisak.

“It is difficult to convey how thoroughly egregious counsel’s closing argument was,” Justice Stevens wrote of a defense lawyer’s work. “Suffice it to say that the argument shares far more in common with a prosecutor’s closing than with a criminal defense attorney’s. Indeed, the argument was so outrageous that it would have rightly subjected a prosecutor to charges of misconduct.”

In the second case, Justice Stevens did vote to uphold the death sentence, saying that even a closing argument worthy of Clarence Darrow would not have spared the defendant.

That carefully calibrated distinction was of a piece with the view he announced in 2008 in Baze v. Rees, when he said he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. But he went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”

Thursday’s decision in the Citizens United case was more full-throated.

“The majority blazes through our precedents,” he wrote, “overruling or disavowing a body of case law” that included seven decisions.

Justice Stevens, who served in the Navy during World War II, reached back to those days to show the depth of his outrage at the majority’s conclusion that the government may not make legal distinctions based on whether a corporation or a person was doing the speaking.

“Such an assumption,” he wrote, “would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.”

The reference to Tokyo Rose was probably lost on many of Justice Stevens’s readers. But the concluding sentence of what may be his last major dissent could not have been clearer.

“While American democracy is imperfect,” he wrote, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/26bar.html

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Post by roxybeast » March 2nd, 2010, 12:42 pm

Very interesting & worth watching episode of Bill Moyers journal involving how the most troublesome, but least publicized, effect of the Citizens United decision may be the effect it has on the funding of judicial races ...

<center>Justice for Sale!</center>

<center>WATCH VIDEO: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02192 ... ml</center>
February 19, 2010

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. That famous definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing has come to define this present moment of American politics. The power of money drives cynicism into the heart of all levels of government. Everything — and everyone — comes with a price tag attached; from a seat at the table in the White House to a seat in Congress to the fate of health care reform, our environment and efforts to hold Wall Street accountable.

On the right and the left and in the vast middle more and more Americans doubt that representative democracy can survive this corruption of money.

Last month, the Supreme Court carried cynicism to new heights with its decision in the Citizens United case. A case, you will recall, spun from a legal dispute over the airing on a pay-per-view channel of a documentary attacking Hillary Clinton. The decision could have been made very narrowly. Instead, the conservative majority of five judges issued a sweeping opinion that greatly expands corporate power over our politics.

Since then, in at least two separate polls an overwhelming majority of Americans say they want no part of the court's decision; they want even more limits on the power of money in elections. But candidates, special interests, and their campaign consultants are gearing up to exploit the court's gift in the fall elections. Media outlets are licking their chops at the prospect of all that extra money spent on buying airtime.

If you want to know just how corrosive this flood of money may turn out to be, look to the decision's potential impact on our court system, where as you know, integrity, independence and fair play count the most when it comes to preserving faith in our system. In 39 states, judges have to run for election. That's more than eighty percent of the state judges in the country.

The Citizens United decision means those elected judges are even more susceptible to the corrupting influence of cash, because many of their decisions in civil cases directly affect corporate America, and a significant amount of the money judges raise for their campaigns comes from lobbyists and lawyers.

There's now a crooked sign hanging on every courthouse in America reading "Justice for Sale." It was already apparent ten years ago. That's when I collaborated with public television's "Frontline" and the Center for Investigative Reporting on a documentary, produced by Steve Talbot and Sheila Kaplan, about the impact of money on judicial elections.

In the ten years before our report, candidates for high court judgeships in states around the country raised $85 million dollars. In the decade since, the numbers have more than doubled to over $200 million dollars. In this extended excerpt, you'll see how money crept into judicial elections in three states — Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Texas — and you'll get a stark foreshadowing of what could come now that the Supreme Court has announced the sky's the limit. You'll also hear from two Supreme Court justices who went on to participate in the Citizens United decision, one of whom wrote the majority opinion. He sings a very different tune now from the one he sang for our cameras eleven years ago.

We begin in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

BILL MOYERS: District Attorney Peter Paul Olszewski knows that if he wants to become a judge, these days he has to campaign like a politician- on television.

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Action.

ED MITCHELL, MEDIA CONSULTANT: As District Attorney, Peter Paul Olszewski considers it his duty to fight crime. Okay. You've got to look a little more animated, Peter, okay?

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: And action.

ANNOUNCER: District Attorney, Peter Paul Olszewski considered it his duty to fight crime-

BILL MOYERS: To pay for his expensive T.V. ads, Olszewski has to raise lots of money. And where does the money chase take him? To the very lawyers who may one day appear before him in court.

LAWYER: And I look forward to that first time that I'm standing before you, and I have to say, "Your Honor." I really am! You know that would be the greatest thrill!

BILL MOYERS: Judge Tom Burke is already on the court. To hold off a strong challenger, he reckons he'll need to raise $250,000. That means a lot of time at country-club fundraisers.

JUDGE TOM BURKE: You choose to enter a campaign, and one of the first things that you realize is this is all about selling yourself over the next 6 to 12 months.

HELEN LAVELLE, MEDIA CONSULTANT: It's almost like an impulsive buy at a supermarket, you know? That's how people vote, based on emotion. We have spent an inordinate amount of time-

BILL MOYERS: A quarter of a million dollars enables Judge Burke to afford a high-priced media consultant and commercials that are ready for primetime.

HELEN LAVELLE: Am I concerned with having the most cinematic music that I can possibly have behind the radio spot? Am I concerned about what the light looks like when our candidate walks into a courtroom? Am I concerned about how he looks, that we present him the way he should be seen by the voters, as a dignified, wonderful, humble, hardworking, incredible, deserving-of-your-vote kind of guy? Yes, I do. They are emotional ways, emotional angles that I go in. And yes, people do vote based on that.

ANNOUNCER: Every day, Judge Tom Burke brings a lifetime of experience to his Luzerne County courtroom. As a father of five, he's concerned for the future of our children. As your judge, Tom Burke is committed to seeing that those in his courtroom are held accountable for their actions. Vote for Judge Tom Burke.

JUDGE FRED PIERANTONI: Hey, thanks for coming out, Mr. Capp. I appreciate that.

BILL MOYERS: Meanwhile, back in the pack, the challengers must hunt for voters the old-fashioned way, handshake by handshake. Municipal Judge Fred Pierantoni, a descendant of coal miners, does his fundraising with frankfurters.

JUDGE FRED PIERANTONI: After this election, I won't touch a hot dog for at least six months.

BILL MOYERS: The proceeds from his fundraisers are modest, and he can afford only the most basic — and noisy — campaign commercial.

ANNOUNCER: Over 25,000 cases in 7 years. Assistant district attorney 5 years. District justice 7 years. Judge Pierantoni. The experience you want. Pierantoni, the people's judge.

VIRGINIA MURTHA COWLEY: Going on the bus? My name is Virginia Murtha Cowley. I'm running for judge.

BILL MOYERS: Virginia Cowley is also short of funds. Her hopes depend on kinfolk and the public's sweet tooth.

VIRGINIA MURTHA COWLEY: My name is Virginia Murtha Cowley. I'm running for judge. Here's a lucky cookie to remember me by.

COWLEY'S MEDIA CONSULTANT: There are really just a couple of points that I'd like to hit in the commercial that need to come out of your mouth. One of them is," Virginia is one tough cookie."

ANNOUNCER: People are talking about Virginia Murtha Cowley for judge.

MAN: Virginia is one tough cookie.

VIRGINIA MURTHA COWLEY: Protecting our children, our senior citizens, keeping our neighborhoods safe. That's what this job is all about.

ANNOUNCER: Vote Virginia Murtha Cowley -- Judge.

VIRGINIA MURTHA COWLEY: What it has become is the ability to buy the seat. If you can- if you have a half a million dollars, you can basically go out there and get your name on T.V. so many times that you will have bought yourself a job for the rest of your life.

BILL MOYERS: True enough, the winners for the two open seats are the candidates who raised the most money and made the most expensive T.V. commercials. It's a system that disturbs even the winning media consultant.

HELEN LAVELLE, MEDIA CONSULTANT: Other people who are in my profession will be ready to kill me. I don't care. I don't. I think that the amount of money flowing around out there to get people judicial seats is obscene. It's unfair, and people are ending up with a chance to be on a bench who have no business being there. I really believe that we are in a system where elections can be bought. It's sad.

BILL MOYERS: That's what concerned the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, so they appointed a commission chaired by Philadelphia attorney Jim Mundy to investigate the election process.

JIM MUNDY, PENNSYLVANIA SUPREME COURT COMMISSION: When we made the quantum leap to media campaigns in judicial elections, we lost perspective. And now you see contributions of a $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $25,000. I think that changes the whole ballgame now.

BILL MOYERS: It takes over a million dollars these days to get elected to Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, and there are no limits on how much an individual can give. This group, a business lobby, is raising money to bankroll candidates for the court.

BILL COOK, PRES., PENNSYLVANIANS FOR EFFECTIVE GOVERNMENT: We actually got involved in judge campaigns back in 1989. And we realized from our old Civics 101 that there are three stools of government. One is the executive, obviously, the legislature, both of which we play very well in. And in Pennsylvania, the odd-numbered years are the judicial elections. In '93, '95 and '97 we got involved in Supreme Court campaigns.

BILL MOYERS: Having fared well with the state legislature, Bill Cook's outfit is now determined to elect a state Supreme Court which would be sympathetic to business interests.

BILL COOK: And there are issues that we want the legislature to pass, that we want the governor to sign into law. And we would certainly like to have justices find those issues constitutional when they come before them.

BILL MOYERS: The perception that special interests are buying favor with judges prompted the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to conduct a public opinion poll.

JIM MUNDY, PENNSYLVANIA SUPREME COURT COMMISSION: What we found is that people believe that money buys judicial favor. Eighty-nine percent believe that most of the time, some of the time, or all of the time judicial decisions are affected by monetary contributions. If we had no other data than that, we would know we had a problem.

BILL MOYERS: The concern that each of you express was in particular about campaign contributions to judicial races. Why do you see that as a threat to independence and neutrality?

JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY, U.S. SUPREME COURT: In part, it's because the campaign process itself does not easily adapt to judicial selection. Democracy is raucous, hurly-burly, rough-and-tumble. This is a difficult world for a jurist, a scholarly, detached neutral person to operate within.

Now, when you add the component of this mad scramble to raise money and to spend money, it becomes even worse for the obvious reason that we're concerned that there will be either the perception or the reality that judicial independence is undermined.

JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER, U.S. SUPREME COURT: And independence doesn't mean you decide the way you want. Independence means you decide according to the law and the facts. Law and the facts do not include deciding according to campaign contributions. And if that's what people think, that threatens the institution of the judiciary. To threaten the institution is to threaten fair administration of justice and protection of liberty.

BILL MOYERS: New Orleans, Louisiana. In the city they call "The Big Easy," money has been known to buy elections. And that's exactly what's got a lot of people worried that justice, too, might be up for sale.

ANNOUNCER: For 25 years, Chief Justice Pascal Calogero has set the standard for what a judge should be-

BILL MOYERS: Up for reelection last year, the chief justice of the Louisiana supreme court was targeted by a business group, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, known as LABI. They considered his voting record on the court anti-business.

GINGER SAWYER, POLITICAL DIRECTOR, LABI: We don't pick our opponents lightly when we make selections of people to target for replacing on the bench. The primary way to make the selection was tracking all the decisions the Supreme Court has made over the last 25 years. So we drew from the 25-year history 50 cases and determined how each one of the judges had voted on the merits of those cases.

Chief Justice Pascal Calogero had a 3 percent voting record. Now, that's totally unacceptable, to the business community's way of thinking.

CHIEF JUSTICE PASCAL CALOGERO: I've cast 50,000 votes in 25 years on this court. If you want to go back and look at and pick and choose the cases in which you think that a given vote was wrong or indicated a leaning of some sort, it's very easy.

GINGER SAWYER: He complained that she had hand-picked the issues. Well, certainly I hand-picked the issues. Was I going to let him pick the issues?

BILL MOYERS: LABI had the money. Now all they needed was someone to spend it on.

GINGER SAWYER: The first thing is to find a good candidate. And we really worked for a long time to find Chuck Cusimano. He had been in the legislature. He was a sitting judge in Jefferson Parish. He was an aggressive, vibrant candidate.

WENDELL GAUTHIER, TRIAL ATTORNEY: LABI had previously elected two supreme court justices, had poured a lot of money into their campaigns, and now had determined to get rid of this chief justice who had been fair to both sides all of his life. But the business community now does not care about the credentials or the qualifications of the candidate. They care about one thing: How will you vote? Will you vote with us? And so they chose to go out and get a candidate that would be completely aligned with them.

It used to be that you didn't attack the other candidates. That was especially true in judicial races. Nowadays, it's attack, attack, attack. And that lays at the feet of the business community. They started the attacks, and they just- I mean, they lay it on against the chief justice.

A guy that has given his life to public service in Louisiana, been involved in no scandals and no corruption, and then to have the business community, because of greedy, motivated, selfish interests go after him- it was appalling.

BILL MOYERS: To understand what happened in this campaign to Justice Calogero, there's a story you need to know, a story about a small town called Convent along the Mississippi River in St. James Parish.

This stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is known as the "Chemical Corridor." Seven major oil refineries and hundreds of chemical and other industrial sites make this one of the most polluted places in the nation. Locals call it "Cancer Alley."

Governor Mike Foster, a wealthy businessman with a Cajun accent and a "good ol' boy" style, was elected in 1995 on a platform of attracting more industry to Louisiana. In this ad in "The Wall Street Journal," the governor proclaimed that Louisiana is "Bending over backwards" to attract new companies with promises of tax breaks and legal protection from lawsuits.

PAT MELANCON: We've got just about every kind of chemical plant that you can imagine here. Most of these chemicals are either known cancer-causing chemicals or they're suspected to cause cancer in humans.

Right now, I have a father-in-law that's dying of pancreatic cancer. I lost my mother at 57 from cancer. My neighbor died of cancer. The next-door neighbor to us, my aunt behind us, all died of cancer.

BILL MOYERS: Encouraged by Governor Foster, Shintech, a subsidiary of a Japanese company, announced plans to construct a huge $700 million polyvinyl chloride plant near Convent. The governor was delighted, and his Department of Environmental Quality quickly approved the Shintech plant. Then something unexpected happened. Residents of Convent banded together to try to stop it. GLORIA BRAXTON: We got sick and tired of being sick and tired. Now, that's bottom line. Enough is enough!

BRENDA HUGUET: If they'd only enforce the laws that's on the books now, we wouldn't have all the problems we have today. But what they're doing is overlooking the problems. Or when they do the inspections, it's covered up.

PROF. OLIVER HOUCK, TULANE LAW SCHOOL: We have plants in Louisiana that discharge into the Mississippi River, single plants that discharge more than all of industry discharges in the state of New Jersey. We have three or four plants that outdo Ohio. I mean, we have world-class pollution here. The contamination levels that go into the Mississippi River are phenomenal. And unlike other states, we drink this river.

BILL MOYERS: Oliver Houck founded the Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he teaches law. Students at the clinic often provide legal services to people who couldn't otherwise afford it. The state Supreme Court has allowed this student lawyer assistance for almost 30 years under a regulation called Rule 20.

The low-income residents of Convent could not afford to hire lawyers to fight Shintech. Instead, they turned to students at the law clinic.

PROF. OLIVER HOUCK: When Shintech came in, we raised the issue head-on. Is this environmentally just? This is a heavy-polluting plant. It's right in the middle of a community that has already got six other plants overloading it with these same chemicals.

If you look at the levels of contaminants these people are breathing, they're like 100 times what people breathe in the United States. They're more than 20 times what people breathe even in the chemical corridor of Louisiana. I mean, this is just astronomically unfair.

BILL MOYERS: At first, Tulane was apprehensive about challenging a powerful corporation and a popular governor. But the Convent group persisted, and the law clinic finally decided to take on the case.

LISA JORDAN, ACTING DIRECTOR, TULANE ENVIRONMENTAL LAW CLINIC: In the beginning, of course, I had thought that, well, the chances- just objectively, the chances of winning this case — as winning to them meant that the plant wouldn't come at all — were slim, considering everything that was against us in terms of the administration. And as I started going to the meetings, just the level of conviction that they had started actually convincing me, you know, we may- we may actually have a chance here.

PAT MELANCON: We have come together here in the face of a terrible evil, the pollution, contamination, and destruction of the only environment we have.

LISA JORDAN: Pat is extremely smart, extremely savvy. She thinks like a lawyer.

PAT MELANCON: We filed an environmental justice petition. We have also filed a Title 6 administrative complaint, which is a civil rights complaint. And there are perhaps more actions that are going to be filed.

BILL MOYERS: While the students were teaching their clients about the law, the Convent folks were giving the students a lesson in the real world of Louisiana politics.

LISA JORDAN: You always hear that a committed group of individuals can accomplish anything. And I'd always heard it but, you know, if you don't have the personal experience, you think "Right." And they did. I mean this group accomplished something that no one would ever have given them any chance of accomplishing when this first started, including myself.

PAT MELANCON: Shintech will not locate in St. James Parish!

BILL MOYERS: In 1997, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled in favor of the Convent residents, saying the proposed Shintech factory failed to meet air pollution standards.

PROF. OLIVER HOUCK: Shintech is a great victory, a huge victory. I mean it's a big win. But the Governor's is not about winning like that. The Governor's about making sure that the clinic doesn't get in the way of anything he proposes again. It's revenge time.

GOV. MIKE FOSTER: [COURTESY LOUISIANA PUBLIC BROADCASTING] I can tell you this. I'm going to look differently at Tulane from a perspective of being- of having major tax breaks. If what they're going to do is support a bunch of vigilantes out there, they can make their own law.

PROF. OLIVER HOUCK: So he came down here to New Orleans, and he told, among other things, the Chamber of Commerce and our alumni not to contribute money to Tulane. He went to the state legislature and threatened to introduce legislation to eliminate Tulane's tax exemptions.

If we don't do it, it doesn't get done. They knew that. If they can get us out of the game, it doesn't matter if there's environmental law. It'll just never be applied to them. So this is sweet. They don't have to go to Congress and repeal any law. All they have to do is repeal us.

BILL MOYERS: The governor and his allies did not want the Tulane Law Clinic to stop another Shintech. To restrain the students, they had to convince the State Supreme Court to change Rule 20. Which brings us back to Chief Justice Calogero. The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry sent a letter to the chief justice asking him to revise Rule 20 to restrict the Tulane students. The environmental clinic, they said, is "bad for business."

This put Chief Justice Calogero in an awkward position. He had long supported Rule 20. Back in 1993, when a state agency asked him to change the rule, he refused. But now Calogero was running for reelection under pressure from a well-financed challenger. The Chief Justice desperately needed to prove that he, too, was good for business.

PROF. OLIVER HOUCK: So Calogero was facing his political future. And he can't sit on it anymore. He's got to rule.

BILL MOYERS: And rule he did, this time in favor of changing Rule 20. The court required that a group must prove that 75 percent of its members are indigent and provide evidence that they are living below the poverty line. The effect was to sharply restrict the ability of the Tulane Law Clinic to help citizens take on environmental cases like Shintech. The Governor praised Calogero's Supreme Court for changing Rule 20.

PAT MELANCON: We don't have our access to courts because Rule 20 has made sure the modifications that made sure we can't have access. And so the working poor in this community and in this state do not have equal access to the law and the protections of the law.

PROF. OLIVER HOUCK: The week he cuts the deal — he's a Democrat — 29, I believe, members of the New Orleans business community, leading Republicans, endorse the Democrat. Could be a coincidence…

BILL MOYERS: Now the money started flowing from business leaders and corporate defense lawyers, including the attorneys who represented Shintech. In the end, Calogero raised over a million dollars and beat Cusimano by a comfortable margin.

PROF. BILL QUIGLEY, LOYOLA SCHOOL OF LAW, NEW ORLEANS: The Louisiana Supreme Court commissioned a poll about confidence in the judiciary, and they asked people, "Did politics play a role in the judiciary in Louisiana?" And the response was not "Yes" or "No." The first response was laughter because everybody knows that in Louisiana, certainly politics plays a role.

But from the point of view of the people who had lawyers last year and can't get lawyers next year, this is not about electoral politics. This is about justice. This is about somebody slamming the courthouse door shut, locking it and nailing it shut and excluding a large group of people from ever getting to court.

PAT MELANCON: We know that our legislature and our Governor- we're convinced that these people are bought and paid for by the corporations that buy their campaigns and pay for their campaigns. But what we hoped was that at least we could get a fair hearing in the courts, that at least the judicial branch of government would be open to us, and we'd have equal access to the laws and the protections in the law. But instead of that happening, they're giving all the protections to multi-national corporations, and the citizens are being shut out.

BILL MOYERS: When it comes to the most partisan, expensive, knock-down, drag-out brawls for control of a state Supreme Court, Texas is the heavyweight champion. Twenty years ago it was widely known that Democrats and personal injury lawyers owned the courts here, making Texas the lawsuit capital of the world.

In those days, there were no limits on Texas campaign contributions, and trial lawyers made enormous donations to justices on the bench, who often ruled in their favor.

TOM PHILLIPS, CHIEF JUSTICE, TEXAS SUPREME COURT: A sitting judge, he had taken contributions from a single individual as high as $120,000 and had several contributions in the $50,000-plus range from people that did a lot of business with the Texas Supreme Court.

BILL MOYERS: The Texas Medical Association spearheaded a campaign by business to take back the courts. Videos like this were widely distributed to doctors to rally the troops.

ANNOUNCER: In the early 1970s, a handful of the richest, most powerful personal injury lawyers in Texas devised a scheme to seize control of the Texas Supreme Court-

KIM ROSS, LOBBYIST, TEXAS MEDICAL ASSOC.: We aggressively organized physicians across the state to challenge the members of the court, and that was a very aggressive grass-roots campaign called Clean Slate '88. Obviously, politics in Texas is a full-contact, no-pad sport to begin with, and judicial politics at that time even more so. And so we didn't want them to be shy, and we didn't want to be shy in how we conveyed it. So it was- it was anything but a soft sell.

BILL MOYERS: TEXPAC hit the Supreme Court like a Texas twister. In one year alone, 1988, five of the nine justices were swept from office, replaced by TEXPAC-supported judges.

1ST JUSTICE: I wouldn't be on the Texas Supreme Court if it wasn't for the help that the medical community gave me.

2ND JUSTICE: I would like to thank all of the participants of the Clean Slate Coalition.

KIM ROSS: The initial sweep surprised us and was exhilarating, of course. To have pulled it off with five out of six, you know, was exhilarating. And I think it redefined judicial politics, at least for this era.

ANNOUNCER: Who should be chief justice? Prominent Democrats endorse Republican Tom Phillips-

NARRATOR: Tom Phillips was elected as part of Clean Slate '88, running as a Republican and a campaign finance reformer.

ANNOUNCER: And only Phillips has said no to big money with strict limits on campaign contributions.

CHIEF JUSTICE TOM PHILLIPS: When I ran for my first term, I put a voluntary limit on campaign contributions and tried very hard to get support from as broad a base of people as possible.

PROF. ANTHONY CHAMPAGNE, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS: Tom Phillips has a serious interest in reform, and yet he is probably the best judicial fundraiser in the world. I think he's probably raised more money in his judicial career than any other judicial candidate. So he's sort of caught up in a bad situation where he feels this is improper and distasteful, but the fact of the matter is, this is something that has to be done under the current system.

BILL MOYERS: Phillips was not alone in wanting reform. Justice Bob Gammage, a Democrat, found himself playing by rules he didn't like.

BOB GAMMAGE, FORMER JUSTICE, TEXAS SUPREME COURT: As a candidate, I spent a disproportionate amount of my time on the telephone making calls, going to fund-raising events. That's the way the system is geared.

BILL MOYERS: Like many politicians, he employed one of the most effective campaign techniques, the negative ad.

BOB GAMMAGE: The more money you have, the more you're permitted to run positive. The less money you have, the more you have to go to the negative. I had less money than any of them. My ads were almost totally negative. I don't like to do that, but I had no choice. I had to penetrate the media markets.

BILL MOYERS: In 1995, he and Phillips formed a bipartisan alliance to reform campaign finance laws. They persuaded the legislature to pass a reform law limiting contributions to $5,000 per person. But campaign costs continued to skyrocket. Hospitals, insurance companies, banks, developers together were spending millions of dollars on Texas Supreme Court races.

CHIEF JUSTICE TOM PHILLIPS: In 1990, I had a very expensive election. I think it was $2.6 million. Had I unilaterally disarmed, I probably would be on the street today practicing law.

BILL MOYERS: While Tom Phillips stayed in the money race, Bob Gammage called it quits in 1995 after one term. The system, he says, is just too corrupt.

BOB GAMMAGE: People don't go pour money into campaigns because they want fair and impartial treatment. They pump money into campaigns because they want things to go their way. Why else would the contributors be there? They have interests to pursue. They have agendas to pursue. In some cases, they have ideologies to pursue. They're not just bland, benign philosophies. They want results.

BILL MOYERS: The consumer rights group Texans for Public Justice studies the impact of money on court decisions. Director Craig McDonald cites dozens of examples where campaign contributions create the appearance of impropriety.

CRAIG MCDONALD, DIR., TEXANS FOR PUBLIC JUSTICE: We would never allow umpires in a baseball game to be paid by the baseball players. Yet in Texas we allow the Supreme Court justices to be paid, if you will, from the very parties who are appearing before them to be judged.

It's the big law firms who appear there consistently, the corporations and the corporate PACs with cases before the judges. And judges at the Supreme Court level are almost completely reliant on these sources for their seats on the bench. And there are many cases that raise your eyebrows.

BILL MOYERS: It's a problem that troubles two U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Let me just give you some statistics from a poll conducted by the Texas state supreme court and the Texas bar association, which found that 83 percent of the public think judges are already unduly influenced by campaign contributions; 79 percent of the lawyers who appear before the judges think campaign contributions significantly influence courtroom decisions, and almost half of the justices on the court think the same thing. I mean, isn't the verdict in from the people that they cannot trust the judicial system there anymore?

JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY, U.S. SUPREME COURT: This is serious because the law commands allegiance only if it commands respect. It commands respect only if the public thinks the judges are neutral. And when you have figures like that, the judicial system is in real trouble.

BILL MOYERS: We actually talked to a lobbyist in Texas who boasted that he had succeeded in reshaping the philosophy of the Texas supreme court through an all-out political campaign and very large donations. I mean, what does that say?

JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER, U.S. SUPREME COURT: I think it shows that if you have one group of people doing it, you'll get another group of people doing it. And if you have "A" contributing to affect a court one way, you'll have "B" trying the other way, and you'll have "C" yet a third way. And pretty soon you'll have a clash of political interests.

Now, that's fine for a legislature. I mean, that's one kind of a problem. But if you have that in the court system, you will then destroy confidence that the judges are deciding things on the merits. And if people lose that confidence, an awful lot is lost. They've got to have fair decisions.

JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY, U.S. SUPREME COURT: In the political context, "fair" means somebody that will vote for the union or for the business. It can't mean that in the judicial context or we're in real trouble.

BILL MOYERS: What does it mean?

JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY, U.S. SUPREME COURT: To begin with, we have to ask, is it fair for the electorate to try to shape the philosophy at all, without campaign contributions? Is this a proper function? I am concerned about that. I do not think that we should select judges based on a particular philosophy as opposed to temperament, commitment to judicial neutrality and commitment to other more constant values as to which there is general consensus.

BILL MOYERS: The historian Plutarch said in "The Roman Republic," quote, "The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in, and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts and then to the army. And finally, the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors."

JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY, U.S. SUPREME COURT: There must be a recommitment, a rededication to the Constitution in every generation. And every generation faces a different challenge. We weren't talking about this 30 years ago because we didn't have money in elections. Money in elections presents us with a tremendous challenge, a tremendous problem, and we are remiss if we don't at once address it and correct it.
<center>Part II:
WATCH VIDEO: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02192010/watch2.html
</center>
BILL MOYERS: That was eleven years ago. The flow of corporate money to judicial elections was then just a trickle, on its way to becoming a river which would soon become a flood. Since our report in 1999 for example, nine justices currently serving on the Texas Supreme Court, have raised nearly $12 million dollars in campaign contributions.

The race for a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last year was the most expensive judicial race in the country, with more than four and a half million dollars spent by the Democrats and Republicans.

Now, with the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, that corporate muscle just got a big hypodermic full of steroids.

Here to talk about the Supreme Court decision and judicial elections is a journalist well-schooled in the law. Jeffrey Toobin is himself a lawyer and a former assistant United States attorney who covers legal affairs as a staff writer at the "New Yorker" magazine and is senior legal analyst for CNN.

For the "New Yorker," Toobin has profiled those two Supreme Court justices I interviewed for "Frontline:" Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts in this article headlined, "No More Mr. Nice Guy."

He's also the author of this bestseller, "The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court," the latest of his five books on politics and the law.

I've said this before in the name of full disclosure and I'll say it again: I have known Jeff Toobin since he could barely reach this tabletop. Welcome back to the Journal.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Hi, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: You just heard Justice Kennedy interviewed 11 years ago when he said to me, "Big problem. You know, this problem of money and judicial elections." And now he's just written the majority opinion Citizens United, taking the lid off of what corporations and unions can spend in elections. Do you think he has any understanding of the implications for judicial elections of the decision he just wrote?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, I think he understands it. But what the Constitution is always about is balancing interests that sometimes conflict with each other. And under his interpretation and that of four other justices, he says that corporations have these close to absolute free speech rights, so even though that may lead to additional corruption of our elections, that's what the Constitution commands. But that's not the whole story here. And in fact, the government has regulated political speech by corporations for 100 years, since 1907. So it's not like free speech is an on-off switch. We have lots of people in our society who have some free speech rights, but not complete rights. Students, prisoners, government employees. They all have some free speech rights and not others. Corporations. But to participate in the political process, there have been limits for decades. And that hasn't been a problem until now.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think this recent decision means for judicial elections in particular?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, I think judicial elections are really the untold story of Citizens United, the untold implication. Because when the decision happened, a lot of people said, "Okay. This means that Exxon will spend millions of dollars to defeat Barack Obama when he runs for reelection." I don't think there's any chance of that at all. That's too high profile. There's too much money available from other sources in a presidential race. But judicial elections are really a national scandal that few people really know about. Because corporations in particular, and labor unions to a lesser extent, have such tremendous interest in who's on state supreme courts and even lower state courts that that's where they're going to put their money and their energy because they'll get better bang for their buck there.

BILL MOYERS: Well I know you don't read minds, but is Kennedy unaware of what this could mean for, well, he just said the integrity of our judicial system?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, he's more aware than practically any justice on the court because just last year he wrote an opinion about the abuse of money in judicial elections.

BILL MOYERS: That was the West Virginia case where he said a Supreme Court judge in West Virginia must recuse himself, remove himself, from deciding a case involving a campaign contributor who'd given $3 million to the judge's campaign.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right. I mean, the facts in that case were so egregious that the court, which really doesn't like to get involved in specific races, couldn't look away. It was so awful. As you said, there was a $50 million judgment against a coal company.

The CEO of that coal company, knowing that case was coming up for appeal, knowing how divided the court was, put $3 million of his own money into supporting one candidate. That candidate won. That candidate was the deciding vote in the case. And the losing side said, "Look. This is a violation of the law, violation of due process of law." And the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Kennedy, said the appearance of that justice in that case was just so bad, even though they couldn't prove he'd been effectively bribed, they overturned the case.

BILL MOYERS: What Justice Kennedy said, by the way, it's just one line in the Citizens United case. He said that "It's important for the judge to recuse himself. But it's also important that we not limit the political speech of the person who is contributing to his campaign." So he's making some kind of distinction there.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well you know, again, apparently, to use a famous phrase associated with the Supreme Court, you know, he knows it when he sees it. Like, what's too much of a campaign contribution? You know, when does the money get so egregiously out of whack that you have to, the judge has to recuse himself? But, you know, the logical extension of that argument is that they should all recuse themselves, and obviously we can't have a system like that. So that's why, though the West Virginia case is illustrative, recusal is only an answer in a handful of cases. It's a systemic problem, not an individual problem.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think as an attorney and as a journalist about that decision? The Citizens United decision?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: One of the things about what it used to mean to be a judicial conservative was that you believed in judicial restraint. You believed in judges deferring to the elected branches of government, whenever possible.

George W. Bush always used to say, "I want judges who interpret the law, don't legislate from the bench." This was judicial conservatism in an activist mode. Because here, Citizens United was evaluating the McCain-Feingold bill, a big part of it, which was passed by Congress very recently, signed by President Bush.

BILL MOYERS: 2002, in fact.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right. It's signed by President Bush. Parts of it had been approved by the Supreme Court before. But the conservative majority said, "We know better." When you had justices like John Marshall Harlan, who was appointed by President Eisenhower, or Justice Potter Stewart, who was also appointed by President Eisenhower, they did believe in backing away from what the legislative branches did.

This seems a much more agenda-driven conservatism, where if the legislature doesn't do what they want and interpret the Constitution the way they want, they are going to impose it. And that's what's so striking about this opinion is that this is exactly what liberals used to be accused of doing, which is rewriting the laws to favor the side that they want. But here, you have supposed conservatives doing it.

BILL MOYERS This Court did not-- this majority did not have to resolve this case this way? It could have resolved the Citizens United case very narrowly on whether that "Hillary: The Movie" film could have been denied access to cable channels before the election. But the Court reached out and said, "We want this case." And they gave a much broader interpretation to it than they needed to do. Do you think that was Justice Kennedy, or was that the machinations of Chief Justice Roberts?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I don't want to get too much into the weeds here. But, if you saw how this case was dealt with in internal Supreme Court matters, it was very extraordinary. They argued at once on the narrow issue of, "Does it apply to this one-time, pay-per-view cable possibility?"

And then they asked for re-argument. This court almost never asks for re-argument and they asked for re-argument on the much broader issue of, you know, "Do corporations have free speech rights and does McCain-Feingold violate those rights?" I think John Roberts' fingerprints were all over the change here. And yes, this opinion was written by Justice Kennedy. But I think the moving force behind it was the Chief Justice.

BILL MOYERS: But what do you think was behind his decision?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I think he thinks that that First Amendment law, when it comes to corporations, has been off in a wrong direction. And he saw this case, wanted to change it, and used this case as a vehicle. I think it means that there are entire areas of the law that he believes need to be changed and need to be fixed and need to be improved.

BILL MOYERS: Irrespective of what he said about precedent?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: You know, I think the words will live in infamy that he said in his famous opening statement in his confirmation, where he said, "I'm just like a baseball umpire. I don't make the rules, I just call balls and strikes." And he talked about his love and respect for the rule of precedent.

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS: Nobody ever went to the game to see the umpire. Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: He's got an awfully expansive view of what baseball umpires do. He's acting a lot more like the commissioner of baseball than an umpire. Because if you look at all these areas, he's trying to make big changes. You know, he's now been on the Court for a substantial amount of time, five years.

BILL MOYERS: Almost five years.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Five years. Abortion rights. Affirmative action and racial preferences. Now, First Amendment rights for corporations. He is interested in dramatic and immediate changes in these areas. Now he doesn't always have five votes. But he's trying to get them every case.

BILL MOYERS: You said in that article that you wrote for the "New Yorker" last year that Justice Roberts is a doctrinaire conservative who in four years on the Court, now five, has served the interest and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican Party.

In practical terms, you said, in every major case he has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and now the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. What, ultimately, does a series of decisions that he has guided through the Court by five to four majorities mean for law and politics in this country?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: The Court is subject to presidential and Senate prerogative, and there is always going to be turnover. But if Roberts can keep mustering his majority, it's going to mean it's harder to sue for basically any kind of damages. And a classic example of that is in the environmental movement, where environmentalists in the last completed Supreme Court term lost every single case that was before the justices.

You know, the corporate cases get less publicity, except Citizens United than the abortion cases or the free speech cases. But it is extraordinary how often corporations are winning in this Court. The, you know, anti-trust enforcement is being very much limited by this Court. The regulatory power of the state is being limited by this Court. So, you know, if you look at what the agenda is of the contemporary Republican Party, it matches completely what the Roberts agenda is at the Supreme Court.

BILL MOYERS: This doesn't surprise you, does it? Because in his private practice Mr. Roberts mostly defended corporations against individuals who had sued them. So it's not surprising that he would turn out to be a good friend on the Court of corporate America.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: No. You know, I guess when I was covering his appointment, one of the peculiar things about Supreme Court appointments is you don't really know a lot about what people believe. Because he hadn't been a judge for all that long. But everyone who knew Roberts well said to me, "Just wait. Just wait and see how conservative this guy is."

BILL MOYERS: Are we naïve to expect that the playing field should be more even than it will be when corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much money as they want to on either a judicial or a political election?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, that goes for all elections and not just judicial elections. And it's only worse in judicial politics because those races don't get a lot of attention. You know, when in a U.S. Senate race--

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: --a lot of people sort of know where the money's coming from and the news media covers it. The news media doesn't even cover these judicial elections very much. So all people see are these horribly distorted campaign ads. And mostly, the effective attack ads. And, you know, one of the things Congress is thinking about doing to try to salvage something out of Citizens United is at least require identification of the sources of the money for ads.

BILL MOYERS: Disclosure of the people who are paying?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right. We're all now familiar with the, "I'm John McCain and I approve this message." If you have a system that says, "I'm Lloyd Blankfein and I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs and I approve this message," maybe that would have some restraining effect on Citizens United.

BILL MOYERS: But they can still put their money, if they don't want to do it explicitly or directly, they can put their money into the Chamber of Commerce, whose spending has been going up and up and up, and they don't identify the sources.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: The sources. And Congress is aware of this problem. I don't know if they can address it, but the issue of straw man and straw sources and covering up where the money comes from. They're aware of it. They're trying to address it. We'll see if they make any progress.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think a bad situation is going to get terribly worse?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I do. And I think it will be beneath the radar, which is too bad. Because these judicial elections are so bad, but not a lot of people pay attention to them. Interestingly, one person who is trying to draw a lot of attention to judicial elections is Sandra Day O'Connor, in retirement, who has generally stayed away from the criticizing the Court, but was outraged at the Citizens United opinion in for just this reason. Because she knows. She has seen what this does to the judicial process. The money.

BILL MOYERS: Because she was in politics in Arizona before she went to the Court.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right. And Arizona actually has a pretty good system for merit selection of judges rather than elections. And conservatives in Arizona are trying to get rid of that system and make it a much more political system.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that her idea of merit selection for judges, that somehow the governors of the state, with the help of disinterested parties, would pick a group of candidates for the State Supreme Court, do you think merit selection is viable?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Yeah. And it works well in a lot of states. It's the Missouri plan, sometimes, Missouri has had it, although it's under challenge there. Nothing's perfect. But when you have bipartisan groups of people, screenings, or even governors alone picking judges, it almost invariably produces a better, fairer, more qualified, less partisan judiciary than when voters do it.

BILL MOYERS: But governors are political figures. It doesn't take politics out of the process, does it?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: And nor should it. And politics is not out of the appointment of federal judges. But there is a tradition of excellence among federal judicial appointees, and I think that's true of Democratic and Republican nominees alike. There's a tradition of eminence in the community that is required before you get that nomination. And I think in states where governors pick, look, nothing is perfect. But--

BILL MOYERS: Oh, no.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: --by and large, it's a better system than elected judges.

BILL MOYERS: Jeffrey Toobin, thank you for being with me on The Journal.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Great to be with you, Bill.
<center>Part III:
WATCH VIDEO: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02192010/watch3.html
</center>
February 19, 2010

BILL MOYERS: Over the course of a long career in journalism, I've covered this story of money in politics more than any other. From time to time, I've been hopeful about a change for the better, but truth is, it just keeps getting uglier every year.

Those who write the checks keep buying the results they want at the expense of the public. As a reputedly self-governing democracy, we desperately need to address the problems that we've created for ourselves, but money makes impossible the reforms that might save us.

Nothing in this country seems to be working to anyone's satisfaction except the wealth machine that rewards those who game the system. Unless we break their grip on our political institution, their power to buy the agenda they want no matter the cost to everyone else, we're finished as a functioning democracy.

In this I am sympathetic to the people who show up at tea party rallies asking what happened to their jobs, their pensions, their security — the America they believed in. What's happened, says the political scientist Sheldon Wolin, is the increasing cohabitation of state and corporate power.

This is why I find the supreme court ruling so preposterous and ominous. Five radical judges have taken a giant step toward legitimating the corporate takeover of democracy. "One person, one vote" — stop kidding yourself. As I once heard a very rich oilman tell congress after he paid $300,000 to the democratic party to get a moment of President Clinton's ear, "Money is a bit more than a vote." The huge sums of money that already flood our elections will now be multiplied many times over, most likely in secret.

Just this week, that indispensable journalistic website Talking Points Memo.com reported that an influential Washington lobbying firm is alerting corporate clients on how to use trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce as pass-throughs to dump unlimited amounts of cash directly into elections. They can specifically advocate or oppose a candidate — right up to election day — while keeping a low profile to prevent "public scrutiny" and negative press coverage. We'll never know what hit us, and like the titanic, we'll go down but with even fewer lifeboats.

That's it for the Journal. Next week: the two powerhouse lawyers who fought each other tooth and claw in Bush versus Gore are back in the courtroom, but this time they're fighting together to defeat California's ban on same sex marriage.

TED OLSON: The right to marry is an individual right, it's not the state's right. It's not a governmental right. It's an individual right.

DAVID BOIES: Because remember, if we recognize them as human, if we recognize them as full citizens, the Constitution guarantees that they have equal protection of the laws. They have the same rights as any heterosexual.

BILL MOYERS: I'm Bill Moyers. See you next time.

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Post by roxybeast » March 2nd, 2010, 12:53 pm

Now, for a discussion and analysis of the effects of the Citizen's United v. FEC decision from two other different points of political view:

<center>WATCH VIDEO:http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02052 ... ml</center>
February 5, 2010

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. It's been two weeks since the Supreme Court's ruling in the Citizens United case. That's the decision stating that when it comes to directly influencing our elections, corporations can spread their cash as freely as they wish.

In truth, it's not as if they haven't already been throwing their financial weight around. Hundreds of millions are poured into lobbying, political action committees and thinly veiled issue ads promoting or attacking candidates. Now the biggest concern is how corporations might use their newly-acquired power to unleash wave after wave of ads for or against any politician right up until Election Day.

Some members of Congress are not waiting to find out. They're scrambling for ways to counter the Supreme Court decision, especially its core assumptions that money is speech and that corporations have the same rights as people when it comes to spending it.

This week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi named a task force of House Democrats to fight back against the court decision and determine what they can do, if anything, legislatively. And Democrats in the House and Senate began hearings.

SEN. TOM UDALL (D-NM): We've seen firsthand the impacts special interests like big oil and big banks and health insurance companies have had on the legislative process. Now with this decision, already-powerful corporations and unions will be able to further open their bank accounts, further drowning out the voices of everyday Americans in the political process.

REP. ARTUR DAVIS (D-AL): I can't imagine a greater threat to independent decision making by this body than corporations implicitly or explicitly being able to say, if you don't follow my line, I'll single-handedly put enough resources into this contest to defeat you.

BILL MOYERS: But Republicans who for the most part were pleased with court's decision took issue with the Democrats' dire warnings.

SEN. BOB BENNETT (R-UT): He who has the most money does not always win. Indeed, many times he who has the most money spends it stupidly and ends up helping the other side. Just because someone has the right to speak does not mean that he or she will speak intelligently or effectively.

REP. GREGG HARPER (R-MS): It is obvious that many individuals, especially on the Democratic side, disagree with the Supreme Court's decision. But all of these points lead in one direction, toward the government deciding who can speak, who can't speak, and how much they can speak. That is exactly the position our Founders rejected when crafting the first amendment. And it is exactly the position the Supreme Court rejected in Citizens United.

BILL MOYERS: The impact of the Supreme Court's decision goes well beyond Congress and federal elections. Effectively tossed aside are laws in 24 states that either restrict or ban outright corporate spending in state and local elections. So lawmakers at statehouses across the country are rushing to find alternatives. Last week, in Annapolis, Maryland, a group of legislators proposed a package of reforms...

STATE DEL. SANDY ROSENBERG (D): What's at stake here is the integrity of the democratic process. The public is already justifiably very upset about how we go about doing our business. The influence of money in special interest, this opens the flood gates, the Supreme Court decision.

STATE SEN. MIKE LENETT (D): You know, the last time I checked my copy of the Constitution, it begins, "We the people." "We the people," not "We the corporations."

STATE SEN. JIM ROSAPEPE (D): The reality is the only people who can take advantage of the Supreme Court decision are big businesses. The neighborhood grocery can't, the neighborhood gas station can't, the neighborhood doctor can't. This is about big, out of state, and in many cases, foreign companies that could come in here and try to buy our election process.

BILL MOYERS: One of those Maryland Legislators is Senator Jamie Raskin ... who's also a professor of constitutional law. He's using that knowledge to help lawmakers figure out a way to respond to the Supreme Court and, as he says, contain the damage.

STATE SEN. JAMIE RASKIN (D): When the Supreme Court made its decision there was lots of public outrage, but then you started to hear from some people who are saying, "Well, don't corporations already run everything anyway?" and obviously corporations have a lot of influence but under the Citizens United case, it has opened the floodgates to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of corporate money flowing into our politics, that's a game changer.

BILL MOYERS: What's at stake, says Raskin, are laws that protect the environment, public health, worker safety, and economic justice.

STATE SEN. JAMIE RASKIN (D): We see this line-up practically everyday between what I think is a pretty clear public interest on one side, and then a corporate special interest on the other side. The only question is, "Will we as legislators have the courage to stand up for the public interest?"

BILL MOYERS: But the potential enormity of the Supreme Court's decision and the corporate dollars it could unleash means that at the state and local level any effort to fight back with legislative proposals will have little effect. Senator Raskin believes the only real solution is to change the United States Constitution itself.

STATE SEN. JAMIE RASKIN (D): The Supreme Court has opened up a Pandora's box here and we have to do whatever we can at the state level to try to contain the damage. But ultimately, I hope that we really would move to a constitutional amendment. Just like we got a constitutional amendment to give us direct election of U.S. Senators when the corporations were bribing state legislators to send their chosen few to Washington, I think now we have to stand up and say we're not going let these justices and corporations roll all over us. The democracy belongs to the "We the people" and this is our opportunity to clarify that in the Constitution of the United States.

BILL MOYERS: It's a sentiment shared by some in Congress.

REP. DONNA EDWARDS (D-MD): A law won't fix this. We have to fix it in the constitution. So today I will introduce a constitutional amendment so that we, the people, can take back our elections and our democracy. This is not "The People's House Incorporated." We are the people. It's our house, it's our constitution, and it's our elections. And we intend to take it back from the United States Supreme Court.

BILL MOYERS: A constitutional amendment would overrule the Supreme Court and clearly spell out that free speech is a right of the people, not corporations. Getting there is hard. An amendment requires the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of all the states. But proponents say there's enough anger smoldering across the country to ignite a grassroots movement, change the constitution and overturn the court's decision. Already underway is MovetoAmend.org. More than 55 thousand people have signed its petition calling for a constitutional amendment. Another reform effort at FreeSpeechforPeople.org has more than 35 thousand signatures. And organizers there have put together this video.

MALE 1: Do you think corporations are people?

MALE 2: No.

MALE 3: No.

FEMALE 1: No.

FEMALE 2: No.

FEMALE 3: Absolutely not.

FEMALE 4: It's a different animal.

MALE 4: They're not people. They don't have the same rights as people.

BILL MOYERS: The video ends with this plea from State Senator Raskin and Congresswoman Donna Edwards.

STATE SEN. JAMIE RASKIN (D): The Supreme Court has had its say. Now it's our turn.

REP. DONNA EDWARDS (D-MD): To take matters into our own hands, to enact a constitutional amendment that once and for all declares that we the people govern our elections and our campaigns, not we the corporation.

STATE SEN. JAMIE RASKIN (D): Now is the time for us to put in motion a great popular movement to amend the constitution to defend democracy against the champions of corporate plutocracy.

BILL MOYERS: With me now are two seasoned observers of politics and government who have strong positions on the Court's decision and have been exercising their first amendment right to speak their minds. Libertarian Nick Gillespie is Editor-in-Chief of Reason.TV and the website Reason.com, which features a political blog called "Hit & Run." It's one of the most popular the on the web. Both are offshoots of "Reason Magazine," the award-winning libertarian monthly Gillespie edited for eight years.

Lawrence Lessig, is Director of the E.J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University where he also teaches law. He was previously at Stanford, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society. Recently, he co-founded organization Change Congress. To find out why he is passionate about the issue, read his cover story in an upcoming edition of "The Nation" magazine: "How to Get Our Democracy Back." It's already online. Welcome to you both.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to you both.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thanks.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Thank you.

BILL MOYERS: What was your response to the Supreme Court decision?

NICK GILLESPIE: I think it was a victory for free speech, in the end. And if anything, it didn't go far enough. Campaign finance regulation is always a suppression of speech. And this law addresses a small aspect of it. That should help the quality and quantity and variety of political speech.

BILL MOYERS: And your response?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: I think it's an ominous sign about the future of this court and any kind of reform. Because though I support free speech, and even free speech for corporations, what this means is increasingly people are going to believe their government is controlled by the funders and not by the people. And it's only going to get worse after this decision.

BILL MOYERS: So, if you were writing the amendment to counter those Supreme Court decision, briefly, what would it say? Would you say that First Amendment rights belong only to persons, not corporations?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: No, I, that's not my position. Although, I understand a lot of people are pushing that idea. That's not my view. My view is Congress needs the power to protect its own independence. Look, when the Supreme Court decided this case, no credible person could believe the Supreme Court was bought. You could disagree with them in a thousand ways, and I do, about the particulars of this case. But they have their own institutional integrity. We trust that they're doing their work without the influence of money. But they have now denied to Congress the same institutional integrity. Because everybody believes money buys results in Congress. And this is just going to make it worse. So, Congress has lost the respect of the people. And it's only going to get much, much worse, because increasingly we're going to believe they're dancing to the tunes that are set by those who are trying to influence them, as opposed to what the people believe.

BILL MOYERS: Do you consider corporations the equivalent of citizens?

NICK GILLESPIE: No, I think they're associations of individuals. I think that corporations have certain rights in the sense that the F.B.I. or the Drug Enforcement Administration doesn't have the right to go into a corporate headquarters and just start rifling through drawers without warrants. We need to pare back this idea of the corporation as something akin to a communist in the 1950s. Where it's, you know, some kind of weird shape-shifting monster that is oozing through every aspect of American society. Corporations are associations of people. They can be nonprofit, they can be for profit. They take all sorts of shapes. And generally, it's a good way of, you know, of organizing.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: I'm not against corporations. I think corporations are great. All kinds of corporations. And of course I think corporations ought to have certain rights. But there's a "Bladerunner" moment to this, where all of a sudden the rights that they have are not the rights that we give them, but rights that they have, certain inalienable rights as the Declaration of Independence put it. They've magically been given.

Look, you agree, we agree, that corporations are associations of individuals. But the mere fact that I have a right to vote and you have a right to vote, and we associate with a corp-- and make a corporation, doesn't mean that the corporation should have a right to vote.

NICK GILLESPIE: That's right. And they don't.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: So- well, but the question is-

NICK GILLESPIE: That's not on the table, is it?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: But the question is why? Because if the mere fact that I'm an individual, and I have a right to speak. And you're an individual and you have a right to speak. Associating together means that entity has the right to speak. Why doesn't that extend to the full range of quote "rights" that you and I have because our creator endowed us with them. And we have these unalienable rights?

NICK GILLESPIE: You know, we understand that a corporation is a legal term. One of the things that is problematic is to say, and again, in the Citizens United case, we have a clear cut example of a corporate entity that was shot down, it was censored, it was repressed by the government, because it was making speech that was not tolerated by the government. That's a big problem. And it can only get worse if we start coming up with even more nuanced and intricate schemes to control electioneering communication.

BILL MOYERS: I watched several times this week the video that's circulating widely on YouTube. Let's take a look.

KEITH OLBERMANN: This is a Supreme Court sanctioned murder of what little actual democracy is left, in this democracy.

RACHEL MADDOW: If you are a regular person who has ever made a campaign donation before, forget about ever having to do that again, what's the point?

KEITH OLBERMANN: It is the dark ages, it is our Dred Scott…

BARACK OBAMA: Last week our Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests. Including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our electorate.

NICK GILLESPIE: Whoa, what's got this trio of patriots so riled up about the end of free speech in America? Ironically it's a Supreme Court ruling about a political film that was actually censored by the federal government. To call the apocalyptic rhetoric about the Citizens United overheated is a massive understatement for at least three reasons.

Twenty-six states already allow corporate donations in this context. Do you think places like Utah, Missouri and Virginia are more corrupt than states that don't allow corporations to voice opinions on political matters?

For decades many corporations have been intricately enmeshed within the political process, even going so far as to publicly support specific candidates and specific pieces of legislation. You know them better by names like "The New York Times," "The Wall Street Journal," "The Washington Post," "USA Today," "The Los Angeles Times" and basically every major newspaper in the country. If we can withstand "The New York Times" telling us who to vote for, we can probably withstand Exxon Mobil trying to tell us to vote for Sarah Palin, or against Joe Biden.

More speech is never a bad thing, whether it's funded by Citizens United, or by Microsoft, or by the Teamsters Union. And it's especially not a bad thing right before an election when politics matters most. If you want to get exercised over something, don't get bent out of shape over a court ruling that actually increases free speech. Instead turn your ire on a government that is vast and growing and helps or hinders corporations based on political lobbying rather than marketplace forces.

NICK GILLESPIE: Well, you know, one of the interesting points of our conversation, I think, is that we're not really talking about Citizens United or even McCain-Feingold. Because McCain-Feingold came online in the early 2000s. But, you know, the - if what we're talking about here is the apparent corruption of Congress, then we have to look at something different. Congress has gotten worse and worse ratings since McCain-Feingold. It has gotten worse and worse ratings since the Watergate era campaign finance reforms went into place. I - what I would argue is that we have too many campaign finance reforms. They do stifle free speech. That's what they're designed to do. Particularly political speech. Always a problem.

And then my question for Larry really would be who are the corrupt politicians? Name names. Because that's what this is about. Who are the people who are dancing to the tune of corporate masters? Is it President Obama, the first President since Richard Nixon to run a presidential campaign fully on private money?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, I want to get exercised, just as you demanded that we do, about the problem of lobbyists who are bending policy to favor some corporations and against others, rather than letting the market forces work. Because that's exactly the problem. Now, you could say, I could say to you-

NICK GILLESPIE: And we have seen an explosion of corporate lobbying, after Obama went into office. This past year has been the biggest bumper year for lobbyists ever. What I would argue is it has nothing to do with patrolling speech or even elections, what it has to do with is the fact, we have a budget, the budget that's on the table now is $3.8 trillion. As long as the government is shoveling that kind of cash around, people are going to be sniffing out ways to get their share.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Absolutely.

NICK GILLESPIE: Or more than their fair share.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: But absolutely. But then the problem here is that increasingly members are thinking not about what makes sense, and people on the Right don't think about what makes sense. They don't think about how to shrink government and make government simpler. They think about what's going to make it easier for the lobbyists to help channel money into their campaigns. We've become, they've produced the fundraising Congress. Where their obsession is, "How do I make the people who will fund my campaigns happier?" And that leads to all the problems you think about and all the problems I think about it. So, it leads to bigger government, more complicated taxes.

NICK GILLESPIE: So, who's somebody who's- the vote has been bought? One of the interesting things-

BILL MOYERS: Well, you, Larry - by the way, Larry does name names in this Nation Magazine cover story.

NICK GILLESPIE: Yeah, I think we need to name them.

BILL MOYERS: Very particular.

NICK GILLESPIE: But you know, because Anthony Kennedy, in his decision, in Citizens United said, you know, "In the 100,000 documents that were submitted or pages of documentation, there, nobody offered evidence of a single vote being bought." Is it that none of the single votes are bought? But the whole thing is bought?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Absolutely. I mean, the vast majority of American people believe money buys results in Congress. This decision is going to make that worse, because there's going to be an extraordinary-

NICK GILLESPIE: Does it? Does it? They think they do.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Because look-

BILL MOYERS: Well-

LAWRENCE LESSIG: One percent of profits of companies were spent on political speech. The total amount of money spent on political speech would double from what's being spent right now. So-

NICK GILLESPIE: Well, we'll see. We'll see, right?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: We'll see. I agree. But the point is-

NICK GILLESPIE: You expect a deluge in the next election in the, in 2010.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: And neither of us know whether there's going to be. But what we both agree about is that the existing system is controlled by a set of interests, which is not what the Constitution said it was supposed to be controlled by. Dependency not upon the people, but dependency upon the funders.

NICK GILLESPIE: Actually, but I'm not sure of that. The problem are politicians, the reason why Congress's ratings have gone down is because the Bush administration lied about the War in Iraq. It lied about the Patriot Act. It lied about TARP. I mean, you know, when you think about it, the - you know, which - and TARP I think is a good case. I don't think the corporations had to buy anybody, because people like Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson were already well into the pocket.

That is not corruption that is going to be fixed by saying we need public elections. We need a mix, a voluntary mix of public and private elections. That - that's not what fixes it.

BILL MOYERS: Is corporate advertising free speech, in your judgment?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, I think that we should have a system where we can treat the widest range of speech as free speech. I want a world where we can have the broadest range of speech, including corporate speech. Including speech I don't agree with. The problem that I see is that when that speech gets read by the ordinary American people as just another way in which Congress is focusing on the funders rather than focusing on the people, it erodes the trust in this government.

Because the point in my view is not whether people's souls have been bought. I don't care if a particular Congressman's soul has been corrupted by money. The fact is, the institution has been corrupted, because the vast majority- in California, 90 percent of people believe money is buying results. In a democracy, people are supposed to believe votes are getting results.

BILL MOYERS: Do you really think large expenditures by corporations in political elections is benign?

NICK GILLESPIE: Yeah. Well, first, let's define corporations, because, you know, this whole case, this conversation, which I think is really important. It's important to remember it was about a small nonprofit with effectively a zero budget that had a political documentary censored by the government. This should be a moment for people who believe in any version of free speech to stand up and say, "Never again."

How do you- how- legally, how do you say this group of, association of individuals that's a nonprofit has free speech, like Citizens United. Versus Exxon Mobil, versus Goldman Sachs, et cetera. And actually, I think that what is good about this situation is that we're in an age of information. Where very few things stay secret very long. So, if Exxon Mobil starts doing all sorts of stuff, its shareholders are going to be pissed off. The people who buy gas at the pump are going to be mad, et cetera. I don't- I predict that we will not see this deluge - increased deluge of corporate money directly into campaign speech.

BILL MOYERS: Let me ask a specif-- take the question-- this is from a reporter Ryan Grim, who's reporting on-- Speaker Pelosi is setting up a task force to try to counter the Supreme Court decision.

"Citizens United allows corporations to spend money directly from their general treasury." That's the truth. "Meaning Goldman Sachs could decide to make a few billion less in loans, and instead spend it electing members of Congress. Which might be a much more lucrative investment. The kind of money that Goldman can find in its couch cushions could dramatically alter a House race, if they decided to run ads against a particular candidate or set of candidates." That's the example that people are drawing from a decision that says, that takes the lid off of advertising run by corporations or unions in the weeks before an election. Do you think that's the true, a potential possibility?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: We can't deny its potential. But it might be that spending money on lobbyists is a more effective way for Goldman to get what they want. And God knows they have spent an enormous amount on lobbyists. And they have gotten exactly the regulations they wanted. Which led us into the catastrophe we have just come through. And I think one of the problems with this attention to Citizens United is if we think it's a solution to go back to the day before Citizens United, then we're completely delusional about the problem. The problem wasn't created by Citizens United. We already had a problem when Citizens United was decided. And we have to address that more fundamental problem, and this is exactly what Nick was trying to say we should get exercised about. Nick said we should get exercised about the lobbyists who use their power to get government to benefit some against others, rather than the free market.

That's exactly the problem I'm talking about, as well. And so, I don't care that "Hillary: The Movie" gets to be out there. I agree. That ought to be protected speech.

NICK GILLESPIE: But you do care that it was absolutely banned. I mean it was censored.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: No, I don't. No, no. Nick, that's not my position. My position is we need a system that makes it so that this fundraising Congress no longer cares about the funders in driving policy, including policy that lobbyists are pushing. And instead cares about the people. Because that's only way to restore trust to this institution.

BILL MOYERS: So, therefore what amendment would you propose that would deal with this institutional corruption?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: We, in fact, today have launched a site called "Call a Convention." 'Cause I don't think there's any--

BILL MOYERS: What is it?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: "Call a Convention."

BILL MOYERS: "Call a Convention."

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Right. Because I don't think there's any reason at all to waste time with this Congress trying to propose an amendment. What we need is a long dialogue that leads to a convention where we can talk about what this ought to be. But in my view, the answer here is A) Congress has the power and obligation to protect its institutional independence by funding, whether through vouchers that people have or through public funding, elections.

And number two, they have the obligation to make sure and the freedom under the First Amendment to make sure, that there is not such a disproportionate influence in a particular election that people no longer trust the integrity of the institution. So, I would allow lots of corporate speech, but I would allow them to frame it, at least in the last 60 days, so that we don't have a world where people believe they're dancing to the tune of the funders.

BILL MOYERS: Now, I'm a regular reader of "Reason." And I know that you've said almost the same thing. The magazine said almost the same thing about the corruption of government, Congress and the entire government. You think it's getting too big, getting out of control.

NICK GILLESPIE: Right.

BILL MOYERS: He maintains that that's driven in part by the fact that corporations can spend so much money, they influence legislation to affect the market.

NICK GILLESPIE: I think, you know, a couple of things. One is that I suspect that I have more faith in the American People to discriminate between truth claims and candidates who are pushed by various sources, than either of you might advance.

But the other thing is that I also believe, tragically, you know, and maybe sometimes comedically, we are getting the government that we want. I don't think that our government is unrepresentative. I think the reason why Congress has bad approval ratings is because Congress does stupid things. You know, we passed a financial bill, a massive financial bill that was the equivalent of the Patriot Act, basically over a long weekend.

That's why trust went down. We passed the Patriot Act in a long weekend. That's why trust went down. It's not because of the funding of Congress. And there's a question here about political speech, which I think everybody agrees is, if there's one type of speech that needs to be protected by the Constitution, it's political speech. Any law that says 60 days before an election, we're going to control and regulate political speech? That's going to strike people as nuts.

BILL MOYERS: But they--

NICK GILLESPIE: And it should.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: I'm not saying anybody should stop speaking. But you're not going to get the Libertarian-- let me finish. You're not going get the Libertarian government you want under this system. Twenty years of conservative presidents in the last 29 has not produced one iota of smaller government, one iota of simpler taxes. Because the engine of the lobbyists that you point to at the end, let's get exercised about them, is to make government bigger and taxes more complicated.

NICK GILLESPIE: Explain --

LAWRENCE LESSIG: It will always be that way until you change--

NICK GILLESPIE: I agree. No, until you change the $3.8 trillion to, you know, a bare minimum--

LAWRENCE LESSIG: How you going to do that?

NICK GILLESPIE: --budget. But here's the question. Explain to me how we're going to get there by having you or other people like you deciding within 60 days of an election what speech is legitimate and what is not.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: The first thing we should be doing is passing something like the citizen-funded election bill that's in Congress right now. That tries to create an opportunity for candidates to opt in to small dollar contributors. So that when--

BILL MOYERS: That's something that Theodore Roosevelt wanted 100 years ago. Citizen-funded elections.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Absolutely. That's exactly what he talked about. And the point is if we had that system, when Congress did something stupid, at least you could believe that they did it stupid because they were too liberal or too conservative, but not because of the money.

NICK GILLESPIE: I don't think--

LAWRENCE LESSIG: And that's the first step.

NICK GILLESPIE: So, you're telling me that I now, my tax money is going to support campaigns, active campaigns for candidates?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: My tax money is going to support--

NICK GILLESPIE: That I refuse to vote for?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: --wars that I oppose.

NICK GILLESPIE: Yeah, absolutely.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: People are dying in the name of--

BILL MOYERS: Your tax money's going to support bailouts that neither one of you probably--

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, so you can't just separate one thread out of--

NICK GILLESPIE: Yeah, certainly, but first off, simply because one thing happens, doesn't mean the other. But you can. Because the war, such as it is and the bailout were at least acted upon by a duly elected legislative body.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: We spent--

NICK GILLESPIE: That we agree is representative.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: We spent $1.5 billion a year supporting democracy around the world. Citizen-funded elections would cost half that. For half that money, amount of money, we could be supporting democracy in America.

NICK GILLESPIE: And then--

LAWRENCE LESSIG: But then what it would get us--

NICK GILLESPIE: How do--

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Let me finish please. What it would get us is a world where as the Cato Institute, estimated in 2001, $87 billion wouldn't be given to private corporations and corporate welfare, because it wouldn't make sense for the congress-people to be giving away corporate--

BILL MOYERS: Let me just respond to you on this, because when I am taxed to support clean elections or public funding or citizen-funded election, I'm supporting a democratic process, not a candidate. I'm not choosing between Nick Gillespie, the Libertarian, and Lawrence Lessig, the liberal. I'm choosing to have the process play out as fairly and justly, in a non-utopian world, as I can.

NICK GILLESPIE: And you're going to be mostly paying for a Democrat and a Republican. And as somebody-- I'm a lower case libertarian. I'm an Independent.

I would get rid of campaign finance reform. I don't even know that disclosure is that important. But leave open more avenues of speech. If you're a marginal candidate, if you're an outlier candidate, the best thing that can happen is that you have one or two people who believe in your ideas, bankroll you at the beginning, and you build a regular, you know, you build a larger operation like Gene McCarthy did. Or you use the internet like somebody like Ron Paul did in the last presidential election and get a lot of money from a lot of people.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Of course we agree about the power of the internet. The internet is the key to solving this problem right now. But the solution to the problem is not to deny the very important last sentence that he uttered in his video. To deny that the existing system of lobbyists is producing the corruption of government. The existing system of lobbyists that are being funded in exactly this way. That it'll only get worse under this explosion of corporate speech, is producing the corruption. The internet might get around that.

BILL MOYERS: Larry, you keep coming down hard on lobbyists, who are people doing the work they're paid to do. If you eliminated all the lobbyists from Washington, D.C., 35, 36, 37 thousand of them, that would not stop what you find and many people find objectionable about the Supreme Court decision. The corporation not needing a lobbyist could go right to the television station and flood his district in Ohio with ads.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, I don't--

BILL MOYERS: Or unions to do that.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: I actually don't have a problem with lobbyists, you know, as John Edwards used to say, when we used to quote John Edwards, there's all the difference in the world between a lawyer making an argument to a jury and a lawyer handing out $100 bills to the jurors. And the problem is the lobbyists have now become the funnels, the channels through which Members, who spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money, get money.

So, they become dependent upon the lobbyists, and the point is we need to address that problem. Congress needs to be dependent upon the people, not upon the funders.

NICK GILLESPIE: You know, you started off by talking about how people don't think the Supreme Court, however much they disagree with it, they don't think the Supreme Court is bought and paid for. Part of that has to do with lifetime tenure, I think. And, you know, what you're talking about here is you know, we've tried in a number, you know, in an infinite number of schemes that all seem smart on paper. Of like, "Okay, we're going to do this to ban this kind of money. And this kind of money. And this kind of money. And this kind of pay off. And institutional corruption." It never seems to work. Unless you said to Congressmen, unless you killed Congressmen at the end of their tenure, they're going to, you know, you know they're going to be gaming into the future. I mean, the trade associations, the trade associations of Washington, D.C. are, you know, are staffed by former congressmen and former senators who cash out and go into lobbying.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: The point is, we've now produced a Congress which is focused on preserving the exact problem you've identified.

NICK GILLESPIE: What--

LAWRENCE LESSIG: The lobbying system.

NICK GILLESPIE: Here-- one of the things, though, and I think what the failure of health care reform shows, whether you like the outcome or not, is that Congress actually reacts to popular, you know, the popular electorate. This was a wildly unpopular bill. And it became more unpopular, as it happened. I hope that we will see something similar happen with TARP, with the bailout, certainly with the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But Congress does respond to what the people talk about.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Which is why the people--

NICK GILLESPIE: It's not simply—

LAWRENCE LESSIG: --hate the Congress so much? There's a conflict here.

NICK GILLESPIE: It's not a good system. Yeah.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: If they're either doing what the people want, the people

NICK GILLESPIE: It's -- I would think that, you know, creating amendments to the Constitution or day to day law based on polls about trust, it's highly dubious.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: The trust of Congress has not just blipped in the last couple of months. It has been a trend for the last 20 years. And the institution that has consistently maintained high trust is the one non-democratic institution in our system. The court. And it's not because they've got, just because they've got life tenure, it's because they're obsessive about making sure that nobody can believe that the reason they're deciding what they're deciding is because of the money.

Look, in this very term, the court created a constitutional rule that says a judge has to recuse himself where independent expenditures create the impression in people's mind that there has been improper influence in the judges particular decision. They are absolutely committed to making sure their institution maintains the trust of the people. But they're denying the power of that institution, Congress, to create the same trust in the view of most people.

BILL MOYERS: By knocking down all campaign finance reforms. This decision, in effect, negates all campaign finance --

LAWRENCE LESSIG: This is one in a series of decisions, where this court has basically said, "You've got to recognize there's almost nothing you can do here."

BILL MOYERS: There is a phrase in that court decision that jolted a lot of people who believe in campaign finance reform. And it says quote, "The fact that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt."

Doesn't this mean that if you can only prove blatant corruption, as you've said, name names through a quid pro quo, I mean, I got $500,000 from this source and I'm going to do what that source wants me to do when I vote next week in Congress. You're going to have a hard time getting through reform through the Roberts court, if that is in fact the case, right?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: That's my biggest fear. And that's why I think we've got to begin to think about a constitutional change that makes possible or secures reform. Now, I think we should push for citizen-funded elections today. And there's a bill right now in Congress, the Larson-Jones bill that would achieve it. And let's risk the Roberts court. But in the longer run, I think we've got to take back control of our democracy, both from the lobbyists and from the Supreme Court and set up a system where we can believe once again in what our government does.

BILL MOYERS: And in the long run, what do you think we ought to do?

NICK GILLESPIE: I, well, you know, I think that we should move in the direction that Citizens United is pointing. And to have less campaign finance regulation. Because that will increase the amount and variety of speech. When you talk about having, you know, controlling or taking back our democracy, that means saying, "Okay, you can speak now. You cannot speak now." In the end, it's about the suppression of speech, which is the most dangerous thing.

I don't like corporations. I don't like politicians. I, for whatever reason, I love free speech. And I see this decision as enabling more of that, which will help me and my, you know, gang of ragtag utopians, hopefully, pull off the caper of the 21st century, and actually work towards a government that, you know, does its proper functions well, and leaves us the rest alone, to live our lives in peace.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: So, yay, free speech, we agree about that.

NICK GILLESPIE: Absolutely.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Horrible, horrible lobbyist, fundraising Congress. We also used to agree about that, at the end of your video. So, I should think we agree. We should have more free speech and less control by lobbyists or the funders. And have a Congress that cares about the people and not about their funders.

NICK GILLESPIE: And we can do that now. We don't need a constitutional amendment. What we need to do is to say to our congressmen, "If you vote for this law, if you vote for this policy, you're done. You're fried." And that can happen. And it has happened. And it should happen more. I think we are moving into a world of more engaged politics, more participatory politics, because of the internet. Because of other dimensions of life. Decentralization of power or rather of knowledge, if not of political power. And it will lead to a decentralization of political power.

BILL MOYERS: Last word?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah, well, the last word is we should recognize there's a fundamental agreement about the bad, the brokenness of this government. Now, you can imagine that utopian of how the people rise up under this system and fix it. And if he's right about that, I'm happy. But I think we need something more than that. I think we need to make sure that candidates and people looking at candidates can believe that candidates care about the people and not about their funders. And that's the loss of trust that we have in government right now.

BILL MOYERS: Nick Gillespie, Lawrence Lessig, thank you very much for being with me on the Journal.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Thank you.

NICK GILLESPIE: Thank you.
<center>Bill Moyers' Essay:</center>
<center>WATCH VIDEO: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02052010/watch4.html</center>
BILL MOYERS: Everybody's been talking about that Republican retreat last weekend, where President Obama engaged his opponents in a give and take. But what you may not know is that it was organized by something called the Congressional Institute. Nice highfalutin civic bunch, you might deduce from its name. Turns out the Congressional Institute is funded by corporate contributions and run by top Republican lobbyists. There are fourteen members on its board--twelve are registered lobbyists. And the contributors to the Congressional Institute read like a who's who of corporate America. Among its benefactors have been General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Time Warner, UPS. The institute's chairman lobbies for among others, Goldman Sachs, B.P., Health Net and AHIP. That's the trade group for the health insurance industry that fought tooth and nail against the public option and brought the White House to its knees.

Now if any Democrats out there are gloating over this, I'm not finished. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also had a cozy little retreat last weekend at a Ritz-Carlton resort in Miami Beach, which boasts "sumptuous marble baths," a spa, and a two million dollar art collection. The website Politico.com reports that in addition to prominent Democratic senators there were plenty of representatives from industries the Democrats regularly attack when they wear their populist hat: the American Bankers Association, the tobacco giant Altria, the oil company Marathon, several drug manufacturers, and the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, as well as Heather and Tony Podesta -- two of the biggest corporate spear carriers on K Street and two of the biggest Democrats in town. Very, very intimate. And very, very politically incestuous.

One final note: after the Supreme Court handed down its decision two weeks ago, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the leader of Senate Republicans, praised it from the senate floor. He dismissed the notion that the decision might allow a flood of foreign money to influence our elections. Now we learn from TalkingPointsMemo.com that Senator McConnell has received substantial funds from a subsidiary of a big foreign defense contractor that's currently being investigated by the Justice Department for bribery. Senator McConnell has been quite good to that subsidiary -- this year alone he's requested seventeen million dollars in earmarks for its Louisville facility. Yes, the sun, and the dollar signs, shine bright in Senator McConnell's old Kentucky home.

Let's face it, two political parties; equal opportunity hypocrites.

That's it for the Journal. Go to our website at PBS.org and click on Bill Moyers Journal. You can read Dr. Margaret Flowers' letter. You'll also learn how your state's laws will be affected by the recent Supreme Court decision. We'll also link you to websites where the debate rages on.

That's all at PBS.org.

I'm Bill Moyers. And I'll see you next time.

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Post by roxybeast » March 2nd, 2010, 2:16 pm

Here's another Bill Moyers interview with conservative attorney Ted Olson, who represented the corporations point of view before the Supreme Court in Citizen's United, and liberal attorney David Boies about the ruling ...

February 26, 2010
WATCH VIDEO: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02262 ... _excl.html

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