seeker for truth

I'm afraid my blog posting last night was heavy on rhetoric (and maybe a little hyperbole) and short on analysis, a symptom of the intense emotional impact of the decision. I've spent a good portion of my academic career dealing with issues of legal sociology including supreme court decisions and how jurists construct law using precedents. For me the 'how' of this game changer feels very clear, although I may be mistaken (only time will tell). The first phase of the analysis starts with media markets and media outlets. There are relatively few major outlets nationally and relatively few in most major media markets. Campaigns, which for the sake of argument we will treat as being run by candidates, rely upon funding to produce access to these outlets in the markets where they need to get the message out to voters. I agree with Ginsberg that this ruling will diminish their capacity to get access and to control their message. In fact, I would go one step further and ...

Any illusion that the United States of America is still a functioning democracy (representative or otherwise) was shattered today by the Supreme Court's unprecedented extension of the legal fiction of corporate personhood. The legal fiction of corporate personhood began in order to enable people to sue corporations (early corporations were used to avoid or limit owner liability - among other things). The extension of this fiction to entitlement to first amendment rights only shows how disconnected American jurisprudence has become from concern with anything resembling popular justice. The Supreme Court's decision has essentially rendered all previous campaign finance reform completely obsolete. Furthermore, it has made it nearly impossible to design meaningful future campaign finance reform (i.e. it would now likely require a Constitutional Amendment). At this point, even across-the-board single term limits would not be effective enough to staunch the huge power that has been...