I guess the writer is unfamiliar with the obscure opening phrase of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law." And apparently the outraged progressives don't realize that corporations and unions are associations of individual who have rights. Dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens didn't get it, either.
The media outrage is almost funny. Under McCain-Feingold, media corporations were exempt from the prohibition -- which suits the Washington Post and New York Times just fine. But people with common sense already knew what Justice Kennedy found it necessary to say: "This differential treatment (between media and nonmedia corporations) cannot be squared with the First Amendment.
I have been having a debate with a friend through the e-mail system. My friend is outraged. He cites the misdeeds of corporations going back to our first Chief Justice John Marshall as proof that corporations need to be reigned in, and hard. The fact of the matter is that he is partially correct. The railroads sometimes committed fraud, and corrupted local officials in acquiring their rights of way. Certainly Rockefeller engaged in sharp business practices that today could seen as illegal in building his Standard Oil empire. But most of his examples, it seems to me, are examples of corporate officers committing crimes, not of legitimate advertising for or against specific candidates. And the corporate cash that he so deplores still finds its way into candidates hands. So the effect of the McCain-Feingold act was simply to shut some of us up, while others are not. This ruling merely restores everyone to a level playing field. Let the yelling begin.
Update: Robert Weissberg has a more in depth article at the American Thinker entitled President Obama Flunks Campaign Finance 101. A quote:
The president's reactions betray a profound ignorance of campaign finance. If democracy is to be safeguarded by regulating campaign spending, then America's virtue is impregnable. Justice Kennedy's opinion noted that campaign finance laws apply to seventy-one distinct entities, cover some thirty-three types of political speech, and the Federal Election Commission supplies some 568 pages of regulation, together with 1,278 pages of explanations and 1,771 advisory opinions offered since 1975 (states also have their own dense compendiums to protect our democratic virtue). Masochists are invited to visit FEC.gov and see for themselves. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion also noted that one hundred thousand pages of legal evidence failed to cite a single case of corporate donations purchasing a legislative vote. Indeed, these complicated laws require candidates to hire election law experts, and if anything, these requirements undermine electoral access by hindering those on shoestring budgets.
It is always that way, for every enterprise one can think of. The more red tape and regulation surrounding a particular enterprise, the more funds one needs to start that enterprise. Becoming a politician is no different, indeed it may be more important than for many others.
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