Bill Moyers Comes Out Against the First Amendment
February 26, 2010
That great ultra-liberal windbag Bill Moyers slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which that found that corporations have First Amendment rights to free speech and that Congress cannot use its power to muzzle speech it finds inconvenient during election time. (I didn’t watch the Bill Moyers Journal broadcast on PBS myself, but Billionaires Against Elections - aka Justice at Stake - summarized the lowlights on Gavel Grab.)
Moyers frets that the ruling “greatly expands corporate power over our politics” and “that corporate muscle just got a big hypodermic full of steroids.” Between bouts of such bloviating, he enlisted legal scholar/analyst/pooh-bah Jeffrey Toobin, who said the answer to this decision was - you guessed it - “merit” selection:
“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.”
Toobin offered no evidence to support this condemnation of democracy, or if he did, the folks who want to Grab the Gavel from the American people chose not to report it.
The truth is, Citizens United will probably not alter corporate spending on campaigns all that dramatically. Corporations have always been able to donate. The only difference now is these donations can be used to expressly advocate for a particular candidate, rather than going right up to the edge with issue ads. Any increase in corporate political spending is likely to be dwarfed by the trial bar and trade unions – two groups whose future prosperity is so dependent on their ability to pull the levers of government power.
In any event, Moyers himself had no concrete proof of any vast corporate conspiracy, other than a mysterious reference to a “very rich oilman” who paid $300,000 “to get a moment of President Clinton’s ear.” Did this fat cat get anything in return? I guess we’ll have to wait until the next episode.
Posted by Dan Pero in the categories: Citizens United, Judicial Elections, Justice at Stake
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[...] week I posted an item on Bill Moyers’ PBS rant about Citizens United, calling out the lack of any proof behind his hysterical assertion that [...]