It's a nice ironic touch that the case is -- and always will be - known as "Citizens United." A more apt label, without the doublespeak, would be "Citizens Over-ruled."
The Supreme Court's decision to allow corporate money to be spent in electoral campaigns is surely not a victory for united citizens but rather a triumph of corporate power over the nation's citizenry. The majority decision is remarkable not only for its legal sophistry but for its blithe denial of context and reality: reading the 57-page decision, one would never imagine that political life in a democracy could be, or ever has been, distorted, deformed, or undermined by large sums of money.
Indeed, the decision helps to undo the broad political pact that this nation began to adopt roughly a century ago to counter the threat that industrial capitalism posed to democratic institutions. To observers of late-nineteenth century legislatures (including the U.S. congress), it was obvious that newly large and powerful economic interests could utilize their riches to drown out the voice of the people: this was, after all, the era when the word "railroad" first appeared as a verb, reflecting the ability of the nation's largest corporations (railroads) to get legislatures to do their bidding.
Many contemporaries believed that democracy could not endure if huge, private centers of economic power remained on the scene: they advocated either some form of socialism or breaking these economic behemoths into smaller units. Other, more centrist figures gradually developed a different approach: to allow major concentrations of private economic power to exist while encouraging the state to regulate and provide checks on that power.
This broad deal, or pact, central to American life in the twentieth century, could succeed only to the extent that the state represented the will of the people - which meant that elections had to be based on "one person, one vote" and that the voices of all individuals, to the extent possible, had to count equally. When the Tillman Act was passed in 1907, banning corporate contributions to candidates, its fundamental rationale was that the inequalities inherent in an industrial capitalist economy ought not be replicated, or reinforced, in politics or governance.
It was a sensible, if imperfect and incomplete, deal. And it is now gone, eroded by past court rulings and pieces of legislation and, as of January 21, buried by the Supreme Court. Political life in the United States will henceforth mirror, rather than offset, the inequalities of our economic order - even more than it does already.
One further thought about this case, prompted by an effort to imagine what historians might write about it twenty or fifty years from now: will it really seem to be a coincidence that the conservative, Republican wing of the court legalized the use of corporate money a mere year after the Obama campaign's stunning success with grassroots fundraising?
When government is allowed to venture into and control every aspect of life far, far beyond original Conatitutional limits, money MUST FOLLOW in defense of those whose lives with which government interferes, as surely as air will rush in to fill a vacuum.
The fault for ALL political influence arises from either of two sources. First, rent seekers who want to use government to put it's gun to their fellow citizens' heads to extort wealth or control their lives or , second, those who must defend themselves from this extortion and control.
Corporations are just one such group. You don't hear whiners on the left complaining about the rent seeking SEIU and other unions spending their members money without their consent by the hundreds of millions of dollars to support big government leftists, like Obama.
Our corrupt government oftens gives corporations cause to protect the interests of their stockholders, e.g. just one provision of Obamacare would raise the cost of medical devices by 40 – 50%, which is just another hidden tax that leftists can complain about as products of greed in the private sector, when in actuality, it is greed in the public sector.
Separation of business and state is the only solution I can see. Let the businesses do what they are designed to do with only the minimal amount of regulations for safety and transparency, and let the rest be the responsibility of the individual to make informed choices.
But also make it illegal to bail out businesses that fail - that's not the place of government, and doing so props up a system full of business-model sickness. When the risk is too high to engage in fast profit for long-term collapse, the businesses and business leaders that really matter will not engage in those practices.