You just keep me hanging on.

“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.  Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.” Chief Justice John Marshall - Dartmouth decision


Not content to merely throw the Bush/Gore presidential election to its favored boy, in its munificent wisdom, the august SCOTUS has embarked on phase two of its plan to emasculate the constitution. Today's decision gives corporations "personhood" and unlimited campaign spending power. The five/four decision overturns over a hundred years of decided law and puts the concept of stare decisis on its head: "Maintain what has been decided and do not alter that which has been established."

We have a lot of societal problems today; access to health care, terrorism, illiteracy, unemployment, it seems to me that the plight of the poor lobbyist doesn't exactly rise to the fore. There's just not enough big money floating around buying votes, is there? With this idiotic and blatantly partisan decision, the ability of the big corporations and Wall Street to influence elections gets much easier.  Once again the activist Stevens' Court takes the side of the machine over the individual. May a passing wind blow some small gust of humanity into their ossified, toxic personages.

” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

Jeffrey Toobin