In his first State of the Union address, in January 2010, President Obama broke decorum and delivered a most unusual rebuke to the Supreme Court, six of whose members were sitting only feet from his podium. He was objecting to the Court’s decision only a few days earlier in which it extended corporations’ First Amendment rights to free speech to allow companies to fund their own advertisements for or against political candidates (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). In his address the president asserted that, ‘I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.’
The Court’s narrow, 5-4 decision overturned its own precedent in a 1990 case, in which it had ruled against such corporate political ads because of ‘the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth’ on our political processes.
Most careful observers will conclude that the Court got things right the first time. As it turns out, the Citizens United decision was built on both a historical irony and a Supreme Court error that dates back more than 130 years. Continue reading “State of the Union: Freeing Slaves, Liberating Corporations? A Short Story”
