Reality. Reason. Rights.

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.

As a reaction to the recent supreme court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the New York Times has a truly execrable piece where they twist and/or ignore the meaning of an individual’s right to free speech.

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

First, note the choice of the word “intimidate.” Will these corporations threaten the safety of an elected official’s family? Will they hang the official over a 5 story balcony until he promises to vote their way? No. Intimidation here means a corporation will suspend funding and give it to another candidate that shares their views. I’m shaking in my boots from the intimidation.

McDonald’s doesn’t “intimidate” you into buying a Big Mac. They advertise to persuade you. It’s the government that has a monopoly on intimidation. Corporations only have economic power, i.e. the power to persuade, while governments have political power, i.e. the legal right to use force.

And “dangerously waving the flag of the First Amendment?” What is dangerous about demanding and protecting free speech?

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

The heart of our democracy constitutional republic is individual rights, including the right to free speech. This decision protects that heart. At the inception of our country, the discovery and protection of individual rights was a radical idea, but after a couple hundred years I’m quite used to it.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

Another scary word; threaten. This is some serious intimidation. There’s nothing wrong with ”spending whatever it takes to defeat” someone. This is a right and option that earned economic power gives you. Compare “we’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you” to the government’s use of political power when they say “we’ll fine you and/or put you in jail if you say what you think.” The latter is a real, and current threat.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

And here’s where we see their complete misunderstanding of individual rights. Militias don’t have rights. The press doesn’t have rights. Religions don’t have rights. Corporations don’t have rights. And “the people” don’t even have rights. Only individuals, and every individual, have rights. So individuals have the right to form a militia. Individuals in the press have the right to say they want in papers, on tv, and online. Individuals have the right to practice their religious beliefs, so long as they don’t infringe on other individuals. And thus, individuals have the right to create contracts with each other that form corporations. And those individuals have the right to decide what the corporation sells, where the corporation operates, what the corporation says, and how much the corporation spends to say it.

It’s a common tactic to paint the corporation as an evil entity, with evil intentions (i.e. profit), that makes evil decisions. But a corporation isn’t an entity capable of making decisions, therefore, it is an amoral entity. Only the individuals that are a part of the company are capable of making decisions. So making people believe a business is evil that needs to be held in check is how they get away with denying the rights of those that own and run it.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

Congress made it’s view clear, and now the SCOTUS is saying that view is unconstitutional.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Are they really complaining about having only a month to prepare? Please. They’ve been making the case for 103 years.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

An indivdual’s right to free speech is pretty clear cut; Congress shall make no law. This isn’t as hard as calling balls and strikes. It’s more like judging whether the ball went through the hoop. It’s an easy call.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

No, it’s not that corporations are just like people, it’s that THEY ARE PEOPLE. They are associations of individuals who retain their rights when they form these business entities. And corporations aren’t creations of the state. They are creations of individuals that exist to do whatever those individuals decide it should to do.

The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.

Campaign contributions should be unlimited too. But let’s touch on this idea of corruption. Only in our mess of a mixed economy, where government has its tentacles in every imaginable place, is corruption like this possible. So yes, the Wall Street example would look bad, but only because the government has the power to steal from individuals for a bailout. The government’s intervention in the market, with its ability to choose winners and losers, is what creates the corruption. When you make the intervention illegal, the Wall Street example falls to bits. Money doesn’t corrupt politics, politics corrupts money.

After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

In case you missed their true colors, there they are laid bare. They want to suspend the First Amendment for those that would vote against them. Rather than trying to win the battle of ideas, they are happy to resort to using political force to shut those ideas down. And let’s not forget who, with a very short term outlook, broke his promise and turned his (and his party’s) back on publicly financed campaigns, thus opening the door for greater private influence in elections.

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.

Yes, this is just what we need. More controls and diktats for how shareholders can deal with their boards. Or here’s an idea. Let’s leave it up to the free market. If people don’t agree with a company’s support of a given candidate, they can sell their shares of that company’s stock.

And btw, the whole idea of this country is that we are all “ordinary” Americans with the same equality under the law. The owner of a successful business who has earned the money to contribute to a campaign is just as ordinary as the person who hasn’t.

These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.

This was a great victory for free speech and a step in the right direction of limiting the power the government has to interfere in our lives.