CHAPTER 23
Gun-Control Activists Are Confronting Only the Tip of the Iceberg
I would like to have an ample fund to spread the light of Republicanism, but I am willing to undergo the disadvantage to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics for unworthy purposes.
-President William Howard Taft commenting on the 1907 Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions to federal elections and was overturned by Citizens United
Activists struggle to fight for the climate, the rights of communities to be free of pollution from fracking or factory farms, the rights of citizens to health care and education, and dozens of other issues where the government has the ability to limit predatory corporate behavior. Unfortunately, because of corporate money, the federal government and many state governments are making things worse for humans and the earth while jacking up profits and tax cuts for corporations and billionaires.
But there are solutions. While Americans work hard to clean up America’s gun problem—and the Parkland activists have highlighted the cause and encouraged the nation to take a chance to make real change happen now—there’s also important work needed to get money out of politics.
It was financial corruption, after all, that got modern America in today’s extreme gun mess in the first place; the history of the Heller decision is a horrible story of well-funded right-wing groups testing message after message until they found one that would stick with like-minded “conservatives” on the Supreme Court.
There are three big ways to overturn the power that billionaires and corporations have seized through their corruption of the Supreme Court.
The first way is to replace enough members of the Court to ensure a moderate or even progressive majority. This looked like a very real possibility in 2000, when George W. Bush lost the national vote to Al Gore by more than a half million votes and, according to a recount done by a consortium of newspapers, would have lost, as the New York Times reported, the electoral vote as well, had the Supreme Court not intervened and stopped the Florida recount.1
The Times noted, “[A] statewide recount could have produced enough votes to tilt the election [Gore’s] way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent.” Unfortunately, they buried that sentence in the 17th paragraph of a story with a misleading headline, because the country had just been attacked on 9/11 and Bush’s “legitimacy” was important to preserve during a time of national crisis. And, of course, none of that includes considerations of the considerable voter suppression that then-Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris engaged in, as documented by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post2 and Greg Palast for the BBC.3
More recently, to keep the Court in GOP hands, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., simply flatly refused to even recognize President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, waiting for Donald Trump to put in one of the most hard-right justices, Neil Gorsuch, since the 1920s.4
The second way around Citizens United is for Congress to pass legislation specifically undoing Citizens United. Their authority to do this is found in the Constitution, Article 3, Section 2, which says, “[T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.” Congress rarely does this (it’s referred to as “court stripping”), although banning judicial review was pushed hard in the 1980s, including by Ronald Reagan himself.5,6
The third and most likely way to get around this corruption of the Supreme Court is like Congress’s ultimate (post-Civil War) response to the Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling that African-Americans were property and not people under the Constitution. Congress and the states amended the Constitution (the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments) to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Numerous groups, from Public Citizen to Move to Amend, are working hard on this last effort to say, “Corporations are not people and aren’t entitled to the rights of personhood” and “Money is not the same thing as speech.” If successful, such a constitutional amendment would overturn the “new laws” promulgated (unconstitutionally) by the Court in 1886 (corporate personhood) and 1976 (money = “free speech”).7,8
The NRA and their weapons-manufacturing buddies aren’t the only bad actors damaging America’s body politic through what were once illegal methods to corrupt public officials. Companies from the fossil fuel industry to the GMO industry to Silicon Valley have been doing it for years.
These are all symptoms of the real and larger problem: that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations and billionaires can own a virtually unlimited number of state and federal politicians. These newly empowered billionaires are now even bragging about that ownership, as Americans can see with the Koch network’s announcement that they’d inject an eye-popping $400 million into the 2018 midterms.9
Only when America gets money out of politics, as the good citizens of Montana did (temporarily) back in 1912, will the nation be able to deal with the N^A and their ilk on anything like a level playing field.