McCutcheon Decision Exposes the Ineffectiveness of the Left

MY TURN-It is virtually impossible to have a vibrant progressive movement in this country and a balanced political debate of the issues when the left continues to relegate itself to merely responding to whatever conservatives do by allowing them to frame all political debate and terms of engagement. 

The latest incarnation of this formula for continuing to allow the minority conservatives to move the country further to the right took place this Wednesday, when the Supreme Court decided McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, No. 12-536, by a 5-to-4 vote along ideological lines.

While the conservatives were allowed to frame the arguments before the court around a supposed 1st Amendment right to free speech, where the ability for the rich to spend disproportionate amounts of money was characterized as merely exercising their right to free speech, the left abdicated its responsibility to raise other more compelling constitutional based arguments that could have shined a light on the clearly disingenuous rhetoric of the conservatives, while showing the actual threat it poses to these same constitutional rights and protections. 

One such argument has to do with the separation of powers under our constitution, where no one branch of government is given a complete power that it can exercise on its own without the concurrence of the other branches of government. 

Even these checks and balances have already been significantly dismantled by the disproportionate spending of money by the corporate rich, so that the checks and balances envisioned by our Founding Fathers between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches no longer exist, when a Koch, Adelson or NRA can already distort the voting process that only assures their supposed "1st Amendment right" by compromising everybody else's. 

More specifically, the McCutcheon case in advancing the money as speech argument already decided by the court in  Citizens United, in their 2010 decision that struck down limits on independent campaign spending by corporations and unions, presupposes that an individual citizen or corporate person has a right to effect elections all over the country. 

Our constitution's fundamental principle is that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." So, in drafting the constitution not only were the different branches of government given only limited power that could not be exercised without the concurrence of the other branches, the very government itself was divided into federal and state governments where only those powers specifically given to the federal government could be exercised, while reserving those not given to the states. 

Already there has been significant erosion and consolidation of more power in the federal government than our Founding Fathers anticipated. But in addition to separating state and federal governments, each citizen was only able to vote for their local, state, and federal representatives. 

Nowhere was it anticipated or desired to allow any one citizen … human or corporate … to have the ability to effect elections in all the states. The very diffusion of power so that no one individual could wield disproportionate power was fundamental to our constitution, whose purpose was to avoid the centralization of power in a monarchy- hereditary or corporate.  

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for four justices in the controlling opinion in McCutcheon, said the First Amendment required striking down the limits. "There is no right in our democracy more basic," he wrote, "than the right to participate in electing our political leaders." I would argue that the rulings in Citizens United and McCutcheon make the participation and consensus of the majority irrelevant. 

It is now clearer than ever that the only proactive action that the left can take is to get behind the passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn the findings in Citizens United, McCutheon, and further cases that the conservative majority of the Supreme Court will not decide, since clearly there has been no effective response from the left.

 

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

 

 

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 28

Pub: Apr 4, 2014