Scalia Passes The Buck On Citizen’s United
Two years ago, the Supreme Court green-lighted unlimited corporate campaign spending, a stab to the heart of democracy in the eyes of most experts.
Justice Antonin Scalia was one of the five conservative Justices who ruled in favor of corporate spending in 2010. In a presentation this past weekend to the South Carolina Bar Association, Scalia defended his decision by saying about the barrage of corporate funded political ads, ”I don’t care who is doing the speech — the more the merrier,” Scalia said. “People are not stupid. If they don’t like it, they’ll shut it off.”
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He went on to place the blame for our campaign system on Congress (from CBS News):
Scalia said the blame for this type of system shouldn’t fall on the Supreme Court, which he said decides merely whether the system is legal under the U.S. Constitution. Instead, he said the ones who have to change things are the politicians who created the system and the voters who often reward the candidates who spend the most money.
“If the system seems crazy to you, don’t blame it on the court,” Scalia said, during a discussion in front of South Carolina lawyers that lasted for more than an hour.
The real winners in this first post-Citizen’s United Presidential election season will be the TV stations that air the political ads. In 2008, according to industry analysts, they made about $2.8 billion. That number may nearly double in 2012. What does that mean for you and me? It means that the mainstream media profits by not exposing the fact that our democracy is being bought. It means that a non-corporate backed candidate will never have a chance to get his or her message out there.
Scalia is absolutely wrong. He, personally, could have put a stop to unlimited corporate money two years ago, but he, like four of his fellow Justices, ruled that money is speech so those with the most money have the loudest voices. There’s a chance that as cities and states reject the ruling, it could end up back in the laps of Scalia and the rest of the Court. The only way to ensure that Scalia will be in the minority is to reelect Obama (sorry Obama haters). He is the only Presidential candidate that will not stack the court with even more Scalias.
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It’s not that people aren’t ‘smart’, but rather they are misinformed, under informed or apathetic possibly because of the two prior conditions.
With all the available sources for information, one would hope that finding facts would be a simple matter, yet finding those facts is a long difficult process due to the huge amount of disinformation that is abundantly available.
Add the situations people find themselves in, finances etc, fact seeking and checking falls by the way side for too many.
If people were “smart,” the science of advertising and marketing would need to be rewritten.