This comes from The Pen in regards to the treasonous sale of America to both American and foreign Corporations.

Please read what The Pen has to say and if you agree use their links to sign the petitons. I not only signed both petitions but sent in a donation to help the group. This is a good group. I have been a member of the group for the past 9 years.

Also if you are at Facebook or Twitter ( I'm not ) please post the petitions for others to sign and email this article to those on your email list so we can get as many signatures as possible. A big thanks in advance.

I'm hoping these links work the first time.

Because of the gravity of the crime against the Constitution
committed by a gang of 5 right wing judicial outlaws on our Supreme Court yesterday, we are launching two critical action pages at once

Action Page: Corporations Are NOT The People

http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1029.php

Action Page: Impeach The Supreme Court 5

http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1030.php

By any fair legal definition, the decision yesterday by The Supreme Court 5 constitutes nothing less than an act of TREASON against the people of the United States. Having read and analyzed the entire 183 page decision and all of its concurring and dissenting opinions ourselves, we are fully prepared to support this accusatory conclusion.

Having so grossly abused its jurisdiction by presuming to decide a question expressly WAIVED by the petitioner in the Court below (p 12), this rogue Supreme Court ruled for the FIRST time that NO corporation can be constrained from unlimited influence over our elections. And even assuming that the Court intended the decision to only apply to American corporations, the Court expressly DECLINED (pp 46-47) to reach the question of whether foreign ownership stakes in American corporations should likewise be given carte blanche to put their thumbs on the scales of our democracy.

Thus, until Congress FURTHER acts (and it must, though it could not have escaped the attention of The Supreme Court 5 that the current Republican minority has vowed to obstruct ANYTHING of consequence that Congress might try to pass), there is now nothing to constrain foreign nationals, even our most sworn enemies, from usurping what even the most die hard Tea Bagger takes as an article of faith, that the rights of citizenship of this country are ONLY for Americans.
This must be construed, within the four corners of our Constitution, as deliberately and knowingly exposing the United States of America to harm in the interim, by giving "aid and comfort" to our enemies
(Constitution Article 3, section 3), should our enemies now wish to take advantage of this unprecedented and rash decision. In simple Constitutional terms . . . treason!!

The fact is that we now live in a world of giant transnational
corporations, with allegiance to NO sovereign government, let alone our own, sworn only to exploit the most vulnerable and desperate workers they can find in any country of the world. How does The Supreme Court 5 propose parsing which of these extra-national legal artificialities should be allowed to corrupt our democratic election process? Apparently in their minds, all of them.

Action Page: Corporations Are NOT The People

http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1029.php

So what is it that we can and MUST do? The first and most prominent proposal we heard yesterday, and which we of course support, was to amend the Constitution to clarify that corporations have no such rights as people (which is to say U.S. citizens). While this certainly could not hurt, and would obviously help (assuming such a proposed amendment could garner 67 votes in a Senate already stalemated by obstructionism, let alone be ratified by 3/4 of the
states, including many "red" ones), what we must first assert is that there is nothing WRONG with our Constitution, and demand that Congress do whatever it can to protect it.

Action Page: Impeach The Supreme Court 5

http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1030.php

Because just as importantly, we are on ominous and clear notice that
there is no further outrage these 5 gangsters in black robes are not
gleefully and arrogantly capable of. Indeed, in his dissenting
opinion (that the majority did not go far ENOUGH), Clarence Thomas characterized the decision as only a "first step" (Thomas opinion p.
1). It is worth noting that the authorship of the majority opinion is claimed by Anthony M. Kennedy, heretofore generally considered the LEAST wing nutty of the 5. Therefore, the immediate and unavoidably necessary recourse must be impeachment for all five, treason already being a high crime, otherwise the horrors yet to issue from their treacherous minds is too terrible to contemplate.

NEW FOUR COLOR BUMPER STICKERS

We will have much more to say on all this in subsequent alerts to follow shortly, but for now we are making available for no charge (not even shipping) your choice of one of two absolutely gorgeous full 4 color process bumper stickers. Take a "Corporations Are NOT The People" bumper sticker, OR a "Impeach The Supreme Court 5" bumper sticker for free. Of course if you can make a contribution (or if you
want both), please DO contribute what you can, which is what allows us to send these out for free to anyone who cannot make a donation right now.

You can request your bumper sticker from the return page after you submit either of the action pages above. Or you can do directly to this page and get them there.

Bumper Stickers for no charge:

http://www.peaceteam.net/bumper_stickers.php

Facebook participants can also submit the action pages at

Corporations Are Not The People:

http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1029

Impeach The Supreme Court 5:

http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1030

And on Twitter, just send the following Twitter reply for the
Corporations Are Not The People action

@cxs #p1029

And this Twitter reply for the Impeach The Supreme Court 5 action

@cxs #p1030

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at

http://www.millionfaxmarch.com/in.htm

Thanks
Love, Connie ( moonflower )

Many thanks to those of you who signed the petitions. I heard from a few of you letting me know that you signed. Once again, thanks so much. We need all the signatures that we can get.

Here is another petition. This one comes from Common Cause. The veterans here at CE know that Common Cause is a group that Greg supported fully. It was he who got me to check out the group and eventually join as a member.

Please read and if you agree here is the link from Common Cause where you can sign the petition:

http://www.commoncause.org/site/apps/ka/...JLOoFcLDKSOALrH

Are you going to allow five Supreme Court justices to have the last word on our democracy?

I didn't think so.

The horrendous ruling by the Roberts Court to allow unlimited political spending by corporations and unions requires a game-changing response. On Friday, I shared the cornerstone of Common Cause's plan with Keith Olbermann and his viewers: Pass the Fair Elections Now Act.

To do it, we need your help. Sign our petition to Congress urging reform that puts people ahead of wealthy special interests.

President Obama said in his radio address this week that the Supreme Court ruling "means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act. I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest."

The Fair Elections Now Act is the best and most comprehensive option available to address this crisis. By allowing candidates to run highly competitive races that rely on small donor contributions and limited public funding, it puts voters -- not corporations -- in the driver's seat.

Please sign our petition right away. We will hand-deliver your message to your member of Congress, turning up the pressure for a swift legislative response to the flawed Court ruling.

Even members of Congress who had not signed on as co-sponsors of this legislation seem to recognize that corporate political spending must be reined in now.

But the window of opportunity for reform may not be open for long. Please act today.

Thanks for all you do,

Bob Edgar
and the rest of the team at Common Cause

Love, Connie

More information from The Pen. Law is sometimes ( if not always) difficult for us average citizens to grasp with all it's legal terms. Definitely it is for me anyway. For that reason I truly appreciate the effort that those at The Pen have taken to inform us in terms we can understand. They are doing it in a series of action alerts. I find it helpful and I hope that you do too.

This the second in a series of action alerts about the fundamental willful and pernicious errors underlying the decision by 5 agenda driven right wing judges on the Supreme Court to gut all restraints on corporate meddling in our elections. Each of these successive alerts will analyze additional derelict aspects of this shameful and truly
dangerous decision, to further demonstrate why we the people must speak out and act to reverse it.

In the first alert we made the triable case (which no attorney has
written us to dispute) that failing to even bother to distinguish between domestic and foreign owned corporations, and knowingly leaving America vulnerable to the latter BY their ruling, was de facto an act of treason by The Supreme Court 5.

This alert will focus on the abandonment of very prudent rule of judicial review, in favor of haste and the most extreme form of judicial activism, again with specific page number references to the opinion itself.

The most bedrock principle of appellate review is that first an appellant must have PRESERVED the issue for appeal, by arguing and getting a ruling on the point of law from the court below, necessitating fact finding by the lower court to create a "record".
Innumerable appellants since the beginning of time have had the door to review slammed in their face with the admonition that if they HAD preserved the issue then and only then could a higher court review
it.

And in particular, appellate courts have traditionally been loathe to making their own findings of fact (and only in a corrective way) absent very clear error by the Court below, which is as it should be.
The role of a higher court is to apply the law to the facts, and make rulings of what the LAW is, not make their own findings of fact. And this is supremely true of the Supreme Court.

So even beyond the outrageousness of the result, it is at least outrageous the way it was reached, and how that reach was justified.
As justification, The Supreme Court 5 asserted that some legal
emergency existed requiring a broader inquiry in this case,
resurrecting a claim already ABANDONED by the appellant in the court below (opinion p. 12). Why directly overturning precedents at least 20 years old would suddenly be such an emergency they do not explain.

And when you actually read the opinion, the only pressure really on the Supreme Court was because so-called Citizens United was bound to LOSE on the case they did preserve (opinion pp. 10-11). The Supreme Court 5 wanted that party to win. This was in itself an over the top act of judicial activism. But even beyond that they were hell bent on
undoing as much as 100 years of campaign finance regulation(Stevens' dissent p. 3). Even the most conservative commentators agree this is what they have in fact done.

Appellate courts have been known on occasion to comment (in no
binding way) that if an appellant HAD made a particular argument they might have been receptive to it, a kind of higher court invitation for someone to bring an actual case, an actual "controversy". And then there would be a factual record in some subsequent case. But here there was no controversy on the issue on which the ruling was
based, for it had already been WAIVED a priori, thereby denying the Supreme Court any jurisdiction to rule on it (Consitution Article
III, Section 2, Clause 1).

But even further assuming that the Supreme Court was justified in reopening a can of worms already discarded, the appropriate procedure would have been to return the case to the lower court with instructions, what is called a "remand", and which is done all the time after a ruling of LAW, for the court below to make findings of fact and conduct further proceedings, so that there would be a factual record for them to review, should the appellant wish to appeal to the higher court again in the case of an unfavorable ruling by the lower court.

All these prudent judicial things are exactly what the Supreme Court 5 did NOT do. Instead, they called for hurry up further briefing on the new question of law THEY wanted to rule on (Stevens' dissent p. 4), in a vacuum of insufficient facts to make those arguments of law. Instead, they set a scary new purported standard of review that says they basically can make rulings on any point of law THEY want to raise, whether developed in a lower court by an appellant or not.

This is truly frightening! It means that these five absolute
dictators in black robes have now asserted the unheard of prerogative to make their own law pretty much any time they like, if only tangentially related to appellant's actual arguments on appeal (opinion pp. 13-14), a profoundly dangerous NEW standard, to become a new stare decisis if not immediately challenged and reversed by their removal from office. It means they now assert unchecked prerogative to make their own findings of fact whenever necessary to reach the result THEY want to reach.

And they must be stopped. The Supreme Court 5 must be impeached before they go even further off the deep end. Whatever else within the law that Congress can do to counteract this decision must be done, and to make sure such a thing can never, ever happen again.

So please submit both action pages above now. The next alert in this series will analyze the totally bogus basis of the so-called facts the Supreme Court pulled out of sheer hot air in this case.


Love, Connie

This is the 4th Series from The Pen Re: The Supreme Court Five ruling. Just a reminder - all the justices that supported and passed this law ( the Supreme Court does not have the authority to make it's own laws ) were Republican appointees. Just in making this law the Supreme Court 5 were breaking the law of the land. So now we have both Justice Kennedy who wrote this new law demolishing democracy in favor of a corporate state, and Justice Scalia defending their treason on a daily basis. And like the good Republicans appointees they are they are doing what we have come to expect from the GOP and their drone supporters, they are lashing out at Justice Stevens and others who dare to exercise their freedom of speech by labeling them " corporation haters." LOL That alone tells you that it is not freedom of speech these 5 justices really care about.

We see in Kennedy's pretzel logic that same notion that the Republican Party and their followers have always promoted and held...that the benevolent corportions can go unchecked and unreined and be expected to do all that is good and right for democracy and the people of this nation and the world. Has anyone actually seen this happen in the real world? These corporations have given us offshoring of American jobs and created the economic mess we are seeing today. So I guess according to Kennedy and the others it was time for us to entrust the entire future of this nation to these same benevolent companies and give them total reign.


This is the fourth in our series of critical analyses of the many
twisted aspects of the decision by five judicial radicals on the
Supreme Court to throw our democracy over the side of the ship of
corporate state.

And now we continue our examination of the factual funny business
that now purports to pass as a Supreme Court decision, again with
specific citations to pages of the opinion itself.

We have already discussed how Kennedy, writing for the slim rogue
majority, made his OWN finding of fact, in the absence of any actual
trial record finding in this case or any other, that PACs were
inherently too burdensome to even require corporations to try to obey
those rules. But there is little factual commentary in his opinion
that is not as least as specious.

Still on this same point of the regulations on PACs, he tries to find
support by arguing, "This might explain why fewer than 2,000 of the
millions of corporations in this country have PACs." (opinion p. 22)

Oh, really? That "MIGHT" be the reason? Well, we can think of lots of
OTHER explanations that "might" be true. Lots of corporations "might"
be too busy running their own businesses to be working also to
pervert the results of our elections. Or maybe they "might" find that
it is easier to bribe members of Congress directly on specific issues
through lobbyists than fool with PACs.

But because Kennedy's own pet premise "might" be a reason, that for
him becomes the only possible unilateral conclusion, to try to
justify upending 100 years of recognition by both the Court and
Congress that corporate influence on elections must be regulated.
This is nothing short of a fraud on critical thinking.

As further justification for playing wrecking ball with all
precedent, Kennedy all by his lonesome found as a matter of fact that
the makers of the Hilary Hit Piece Video were greatly prejudiced in
having to wait two years to prevail on their claim (opinion p. 17).
Which claim? The one they ABANDONED (opinion p. 12) because not even
they believed the Supreme Court would tear up the law in such a
radical way? Why, my, my, if only they had suspected, they would have
broken the law even more up front.

Again and again Kennedy smears and deliberately confuses the
difference between real citizens and faceless, fictitious business
entities, using expressions like "accountable to the people" and "the
right of citizens" and "voters must be free" and "associations of
citizens" (opinion pp. 23, 25, 33). His appalling and original (with
him) finding of fact that corporations are in essence nothing more
than an 800 pound gorilla version of the voice of the people is
transparently ridiculous on its face.

Indeed, even with regards to corporations the majority pretends that
all this must be done to protect mom and pop, one man shop operations
(opinion pp. 38-39). How further unleashing the largest behemoths in
any way levels the playing field for the little guy (as opposed to
tilting it even more) is a mystery intentionally left unsolved by
Kennedy. In fact, by this opinion all that an obscenely rich
individual would have to do to evade all other election financing
laws would be to individually incorporate (itself an abuse of the
intent of chartering of corporations, if the truth be known), a judge
created loophole as big as the state of Delaware by its own terms.

But perhaps the most blatant flight in the face of reality in the
opinion is his finding of fact that the First Amendment does not
distinguish treatment for "media corporations". (opinion p. 36) If
Anthony M. Kennedy had ever actually read the First Amendment one
time it could not have escaped even his horse blindered attention
that freedom "of the PRESS" is addressed as an entirely SEPARATE,
distinct and additional issue from "freedom of speech" (for the
people). The very statute he presumes to overturn and trash, which
did make such a distinction, he slams as being an "admission" of its
"invalidity" for carving such an exception.

And having arrived at the false fact, again entirely his own
invention from the bench, that there is no way to distinguish a true
news organization from any old unrelated business monolith, Kennedy
all but accuses anyone relying on the First Amendment of being
AGAINST free speech for even making a distinction for the "press".
(opinion p. 37) Another fact pretzel courtesy of baker Kennedy, hot
and fresh from the oven!

It should be noted that this kind of loopy factual thinking is
endemic among the Supreme Court 5. Read, if you can stomach its
snarkiness, this from Scalia's concurring opinion (p. 2), sniping at
the historical review in the dissent of Justice Stevens:

"Despite the corporation-hating quotations the dissent has dredged
up, it is far from clear that by the end of the 18th century
corporations were despised. If so, how came there to be so many of
them."

What's Scalia's logical fact determination process, that despised
business entities would altruistically limit their procreation (like
real natural persons of course), in the absence of any actual
constraining regulation, by virtue of KNOWING they were despised? If
these five were not in the aggressive process of drastically
dismantling our democracy such reasoning would be laughable. Maybe we
need birth control for bad corporations, seeing as how they're
persons too and all.

But here we are out of time already again. So please stay tuned for
the next installment in this series when we will start to tackle
Kennedy's gross misreading of all manner of case precedents, to
conclusively demonstrate they stand for no such thing as he asserts.

And remember, if you haven't gotten your request in yet, you can get
a "Corporations Are NOT The People" bumper sticker or an "Impeach The
Supreme Court 5" bumper sticker by just going to the page link below
and we will send you one for no charge, not even shipping.

Supreme Court Protest Bumper Stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/bumper_stickers.php

We'll have the second printing sometime next week and we are shipping
as fast as we can, so get your requests in if you want one or both.

And be sure to submit both action pages on these issues. First we
MUST have a Constitutional Amendment to repair the grave damage done
by this radical ruling.

Corporations Are NOT The People Action Page:
http://www.millionfaxmarch.com

But even beyond that, The Supreme Court 5, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia,
Alito and Thomas must be impeached and removed from the bench, before
they demolish with any more of our jurisprudence.

Impeach The Supreme Court 5 Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1030.php

The links just above are the regular action links for those NOT on
Facebook. The Facebook versions of these same action pages are

[Facebook] Corporations Are NOT The People:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1029

[Facebook] Impeach The Supreme Court 5:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1030

And this is the Twitter reply for the Corporations Are NOT The People
action

@cxs #p1029

And this is the Twitter reply for the Impeach The Supreme Court 5
action

@cxs #p1030

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.millionfaxmarch.com/in.htm




Love and Peace Out

Connie

Either I miscounted or missed the 5th series by the Pen or they miscounted? Anyway here is the sixth in the series regarding the Supreme Court 5's despicable and treasonous decison to hand America's elections over to the corporations. In other words establish a corporate state to replace democracy.

It begins with an action page. Please read and sign if you agree. We need all the signatures we can get as our democracy is at stake here.

First, we have a critical NEW action page (relax, it's not as
strident as the last one on health care) , which we are asking
EVERYBODY to submit, calling on the House Administration Committee
(with a special function which will send them a direct fax) to pass
strong legislation reinstating control over corporate influence. Of
course we also need a Constitutional amendment categorically
repudiating the wrongful reading by the Supreme Court 5 (Kennedy,
Kennedy, Scalia, Alito and Thomas), but we still need Congress to
immediately confront the Constitutional crisis already in high gear,
to try to mitigate the damage before the next general election.

House member Alan Grayson stepped forward with at least 6 proposals,
three of which have already been incorporated into legislation
sponsored by Senator Schumer and House member Chris Van Hollen, which
is now already before the House Administration Committee. These
proposals would:

* Stop foreigners from buying our government.

* Prevent government contractors like Blackwater from stealing our
elections.

* Force disclosure to shareholders when a company wants to bribe and
threaten elected officials

Please urge Chairman Brady of the House Administration Committee to
move these bills as expeditiously as possible, and to strengthen the
final bill with additional measures to not only disclose political
bribery, but to STOP it.

Here are the links:

For Facebook participants:


[Facebook] House Administration Committee Action Page:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1035

And this is the Twitter reply for this action

@cxs #p1035

Besides the above links from the pen here is another petition concerning this corporate take over of democracy from Care2 petition site:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/620417064?z00m=19828614


SIXTH INSTALLMENT OF THE SUPREME COURT 5 CONDEMNATION SERIES

OK, let's jump back into it. If you recall from our 5th scary
episode, we were discussing the concept of "weight" in judicial
precedents, specifically the fact that ONLY the actual "holding", the
actual issue addressed and DECIDED by a prior court is binding on a
later court, which forms the basis for stare decisis.

Here, Kennedy, writing the decision for the Supreme Court 5
demonstrates that he is either functionally incapable, or otherwise
unwilling or too dishonest, to even engage in critical thinking. For
he claims license to revisit the holdings in the Austin and McConnell
cases by arguing that there were "conflicting" lines of precedent
(opinion p. 32), based on his reading of the Buckley and Belloti
cases (opinion pp. 28-31). In effect he is arguing a kind of stare
decisis standoff between these other cases and the ones he would
overturn, thus inviting himself to step in to resolve the conflict.

Except that Kennedy ADMITS in writing that Buckley did NOT "consider"
the ban on corporate and union independent expenditures (opinion p.
29), and Belloti did NOT "address" the constitutionality of this ban
EITHER (opinion p. 31). Thus, neither case has binding value as a
precedent since those courts did not rule at all on the issue at
hand.

Instead he asserts that, based on some other stray language NOT the
actual holdings in those cases, those Courts, in his omnipotent after
the fact opinion WOULD have rejected such bans IF they had decided
those issues. This is despite the fact that the only support for such
an assertion are the LOSING dissents by himself and his black robed
conspirators from these same cases!! In short, he rewrites ad hoc the
decisions in the Belloti and Buckley cases to say what they would
have said if he had prevailed originally, and asserts that his
counterfeit version of those decisions now call the legitimacy of the
real decisions into question.

This is judicial, intellectual fraud at its most despicable level.
Kennedy elevates, to the status of binding precedent, dubious
speculation about what a previous Court would have done, equates that
in weight with the holding of a case that DID directly decide the
issue (Austin, as further reinforced by its AFFIRMATION in
McConnell), and then throws up his hands and says, "Oh, gosh, nothing
to do but decide this anew."

Of course we all remember how both Roberts and Alito sat there in
their sheep's clothing in their confirmation hearings promising up
and down they would respect stare decisis in the morning, lying
through their mild-mannered pointy teeth that they were not drop kick
right wing ideologues with precedent demolition for an agenda.

So naturally neither one of them wanted put THEIR names down as
official authors of this outrageous affront to the whole idea of
binding decisions. No, Roberts (who as "chief" justice decides who
writes what opinions) assigned the role of case assassin in this case
to Kennedy, a hatchet job he was already chaffing at the bit to
perform (based on his history of dissents).

But in the most self-serving way Roberts and Alito DID add a
concurring opinion (pp. 5-9) going on and on about how this is all
really in the true spirit of stare decisis, never ONCE addressing any
of the factors they cited at their confirmation hearings which MIGHT
justify overturning precedent, namely that something had
fundamentally CHANGED (social views, found unworkable, etc.) since
the prior decision.

In fact the only thing that has changed is the presence of themselves
as voting members of the Supreme Court, to now call black what was
previously ruled white. Especially nauseating is Roberts' argument
that because the previous losing dissents were "spirited" they should
now prevail to the contrary (concurring opinion, p. 9).

So to review, Kennedy manufactured a bogus controversy among previous
decisions, to use as a pretext for resurrecting dissenting and losing
opinions that have NEVER been binding precedent for any purpose
whatsoever, and on that basis to then overturn the actual binding
precedent which was Austin. By his own admission the Austin case was
the FIRST court to directly address the issue of independent
expenditures, the ONLY court to previously decide it (opinion p. 32),
and he now purports to reverse it (and the McConnell case which
further affirmed that holding) based literally and solely on the
CONTEMPT he had for the real precedent all along.

In a word . . . despicable.

But we are still far from finished even dealing with just the gross
errors of case law analysis in this monumentally dreadful decision.
So please stay tuned to this activist channel for the next verse in
the Ballad of the Bandit Supreme Court 5.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.



and

Connie

Chief Justice Versus President Obama: It's On

by: Jessica Pieklo


If the Citizens United decision has done anything it has put to bed any lingering notions that the Supreme Court, while an independent governmental body, is also a politically independent body. It's not. Starting with Ronald Reagan, the slow and steady take over of the federal judiciary by the Federalist Society has firmly placed the Court in the political fray. It's time to just accept that as fact.

But just in case some out there still want to believe that the Court has not become another fully politicized entity, please take a look at the exchange going on right now between the President and the Chief Justice over that dreadful decision and the President's decision to take that monstrosity on during the State of the Union address last January. President Obama came right out and said that the Court overreached and as a result our electoral process now faces some serious challenges--foreign money going directly to influence campaigns, for example.

The Federalists on the bench--Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts in particular, took issue with the attack and the Chief Justice has gone so far as to call it a "troubling development". Me thinks the Chief doth protest to much.

For starters, the State of the Union is a policy setting event where the President lays forth the agenda for the administration. Fixing Citizens United is most certainly an appropriate policy point. The key tenant of the doctrine of separation of powers is that when one branch gets it wrong, the others get to try and fix it. That's the process that is playing out here. The Justices created policy as much as they created law with that decision. They should expect to be criticized as a result.

Second, the President did not attack the members of the Court, he attacked their reasoning. Just because the Justices do not run for election does not mean their are not political animals. Of course they are. The nomination process in many ways mirrors the campaign process and in some ways more venomous because lifetime appointments are on the line. The criticism of the Court in the State of the Union was the equivalent to pulling back the Wizard's curtain in Oz--a rhetorical framework of acknowledging that Justices are in someways their own special kind of politician.

Justice Roberts all but concedes this by keeping the story alive. He shot back publicly and in a forum not at all designed for setting policy agendas. If the story wasn't politicized earlier, it is now.

Quite frankly, I think it is good that we are finally including the Court in the political conversations of the day. Their ideals frame policy, and serves as an integral component of drafting legislation and agenda setting. They are more than just a distant, cold body of jurists. They are men and women with specific ideas of what our Constitutional democracy can and cannot do. They serve as a check on Executive and Legislative overreach, but that does not mean they remain unchecked. Indeed, President Obama in the State of the Union checked the Court and what has followed, from a policy perspective, is the beginnings of a legislative response to bad law. And that's just the way it is supposed to work.


Love, Connie

While rereading this article I had a thought.

I have a question for those who consider themselves Republicans or even those that vote for the Republicans on one issue (abortion): Why - if it was this easy for the Republican stacked Supreme Court to pass this election law changing what has stood for over a century - haven't the Republicans ever gotten the abortion laws changed by the same Supreme Court?

I mean this seemed an easy thing for the Supreme Court 5 to do. Just take a case that came before the court and was then dropped by the lower court from the Supreme Court docket, resurrect it and vote the way you felt it should have been voted on in the past. Hell, they could change every case ever heard by the Supreme Court just as easily. Just state that it should have voted your way, not the way it was back then. Should be a cake walk for the Supreme Court 5 to overturn Roe Vs Wade.

Republicans have been running on that abortion platform ever since Ronald Reagan in the 80's. Yet nothing has been done about it. Why not if it was this easy to get the Republican members of the court to change the election laws on some phony, pretzel logic reasoning that says corporations are people too.? My cat Max thinks he is person too but that doesn't make it so. Or hey, maybe I should register Max to vote. If corporations are people and have a right to vote cats and dogs should be allowed to vote even moreso because they not only think they are people we treat them like they were. Birds too for that matter.

Either it's in the plan and changing the Roe Vs Wade decision will be the next move of the Republican Supreme Court 5 or the GOP wants to keep promising it in their political campaigns. Although these days it seems that homosexuals are their platform hate targets of the day. Except of course the Republican and Religious Right homosexuals. In those cases it is that they "just sinned." And Charles Dobson, one of the leaders of the Religious Right, "cures" them. But he hasn't explained why the cure didn't take because the minister he cured keeps "sinning." LOL

However, it remains, that if the Roe Vs Wade law is allowed to stand after this election decision by the Supreme Court 5 - who have proven they have absolutely no respect for the rights of the American people - then the Republicans or those one issue voters who cast their votes for the GOP based on empty promises of overturning the Roe vs Wade law, might just know that they have been duped all along. Or will they? Well, if they don't watch Fox News, listen to Rush Limbaugh or think Glenn Beck is for real they might come to know they were duped. Miracles do happen.

Just some thoughts.

Love, Connie

Today we resume with our 7th installment in the series body slamming the Supreme Court decision declaring our country the United Trans-Global Corporations of America.

A Supreme Court decision is supposed to be the words straight from the horse's mouth. But the one in the Corporations United case calls into question which end of the horse it came from.

Where we last left our villains on the Supreme Court we were talking about how Kennedy, besides his own fact finding errors, had built his entire decision on misreading the actual holdings of the cases he was citing, relying instead on dissents (often his own) and dicta (stray
language) which are NOT supposed to take precedence.

Central to Kennedy's specious analysis is his quotation OUT of
context (opinion at p. 30) of this language from the Belloti decision putatively rejecting
"the proposition that speech that OTHERWISE would be within the
of the First Amendment loses that protection simply
because its source is a corporation."

Here WE emphasize the word "otherwise" in this passage because it is
pivotal and the only one that really matters. Kennedy would read this
rejection, of the hypothetical proposition stated, as a declaration
that corporations have unlimited and ABSOLUTE First Amendment free
speech rights. The Belloti decision held NO such thing. It says here
only that corporations have SOME free speech rights, subject to other
limitations provided elsewhere.

And indeed elsewhere in the Belloti decision it in fact expressly
limited itself to the issue of whether corporations can participate
in a debate on POLICY issues in public discourse. The issue of
whether corporations can without any regulation or restriction
participate in CANDIDATE advocacy, in particular within 30 days of an
election, as per the statute overturned by Kennedy's outlaw decision,
by Kennedy's own admission (opinion p. 31) the Belloti decision did
NOT "address".

Here's what Belloti actually says about the intended scope of its
holding.

"... our consideration of a corporation's right to speak on issue of
general public interest implies no comparable right in the quite
different context of participation in a political campaign for
election to public office." [435 US at 788, n. 26.]

Whoop, there it is, as they say in the legal biz. The Belloti
decision concerned only whether a corporation could weigh in on the
merits of a referendum on a public policy issue. To explode that into
a destruction of all reasonable restraints on untoward corporate
influence on candidate elections is for Kennedy to play terrorist
with our entire infrastructure of jurisprudence.

All this may have escaped Kennedy's horse blindered attention in
arriving at his perverse result, but it sure did not escape Justice
Stevens, who precisely pointed all this out in his dissent at p. 52.
Nobody disputes that corporations have at least some First Amendment
rights. Otherwise corporate advertising in ALL forms would be banned.
But here Kennedy engages in a unilateral refusal to read the words in
the Belloti decision for what they actually say.

In short, Belloti EXPRESSLY precluded the interpretation Kennedy
would give it. This is beyond reckless, it is beyond irresponsible,
it is beyond dishonest, it is Orwellian, and coming from the mouth of
a Supreme Court justice ... it is criminal.

Likewise, in his deliberate misapplication of the Buckley case
Kennedy's citation of vague language disapproving of restricting "the
speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the
relative voice of others" is no more availing (opinion p. 33) to
decide an issue he HIMSELF admits Buckley did not "consider" (opinion
p. 29).

This is not about seeking to "enhance" the voice of citizens
vis-a-vis corporations. It is exactly because corporations have
overwhelmingly so much more financial power RELATIVE to individual
citizens that Congress has passed reasonable regulations on them. And
over the decades the Courts have affirmed these regulations over and
over, to keep the voice of actual citizens from being drowned out,
which regulations Kennedy now so unrighteously overturns.

Seven parts in this series already, and are we done yet ripping this
heinous decision to legal shreds? Not even close. Next up in this
series, the drop kick hypocrisy of Kennedy's First Amendment
absolutism as applied on behalf of corporations only.




Love, Connie