Your voice versus their dollars.

The more I watch and listen to the pundits talk about this election (which has gone on far too long already and it is just May) I get the distinct notion that the Robert’s Court really screwed America. Their ruling of Citizen’s United v Federal Election Commission is a travesty of the first order.

Now many have decried its outcome and placed blame on the five justices who supported the folly, but I want to take a look at the ruling from a historical context. Something Scalia and his brothers sought to prove that Jefferson, et al. would have approved. They believe that the Founding Fathers would want all entities to have a voice in America’s government. And by all, they mean corporations as well.  I whole heartily disagree.

Jefferson, Madison, Washington and Franklin all wrote about the dangers of large institutions controlling the colonies. Our forefathers had left England, after all, to get away from a monarchy that had too much power concentrated in too few hands. Even Alexander Hamilton, who was by far and away the most open to allowing large institutions to have a role in our financial life, wrote against allowing large concentrated power to once again dominate American values.

So when the court sanctimoniously said it was what the Founding Fathers had in mind all alone – from the very beginning – I laugh and scoff at them for being very poor students of history. But of course they are not trying to be scholars of history; this court is trying to be a concentrator of right-wing power in America. The average citizen has little, if any, voice on this court as long as Justice Kennedy keeps siding with the extreme political right on the bench. Kennedy was suppose to be a voice of reason and represent the middle of America. Instead, he has sided with the evil empire in recent decisions. As Justice Hugo Black, first thought to be a conservative, proved, one can never be sure how a justice will turn out once seated on the high bench.

Citizen’s United is but one of the examples of this court messing with the constitution in the same way it and its sponsors (the GOP) has criticized the leftist court of Black and Douglas a generation past. I want my court to be neutral. In the center. Representing justice as a value with no leanings in either direction. That is hard when dealing with people who have strong convictions. But to give away the power of the voting booth, to the moneyed machines of corporations and super PACs is ridiculous and can’t be defended in any logical way, if you study real American History.

Perhaps the people writing the American history books that Roberts, Scalia and their cronies read from, are the same people now writing the science books that proclaim the Earth to be a mere 6,000 years old. ‘Who cares about facts. We will just change history and science to meet our limited worldview.’

We have seen institutions – strong and powerful, have to change their stances when their ideology is proven wrong. For centuries the church proclaimed the Earth to be the center of the universe: that the sun revolved around us and that the Earth was flat. To argue with this belief was heresy. And you could be excommunicated and even put to death for such radical denial of the held doctrine. But we know that is wrong.

At some time, someone is going to have to challenge the people who have taken over the thought process on the right. Just as the church had to abandon the ‘Earth is flat’ doctrine, the GOP is going to have to move into the 21^st century for conservative messages to have relevance anymore. Even the strongest voices of conservative reason, Will, McCain, and even Gingrich for heaven’s sake, has warned the right not to hold to doctrines that will make them be on the wrong side of history. Recently the New York Times ran an article describing the typical Republican voter and it is an aging upper, middle-class white person. I remember when Cadillac found the same to be true for its target market and it had to retool its product line and its marketing message to keep up with the times or become irrelevant. The same is going to happen to the GOP.

But there is hope for conservatives. The first step is to get the Citizen’s United ruling reversed. If not on the bench then by legislation. To be sure, it is working in their favor now. But what happens when they become so out of step with the times that it works against them. Then what?

No amount of corporate money can change the fact that people will get tired of being bullied. And that is how the GOP is getting their power right now.

And nobody…nobody…likes a bully.           

Citizen’s United ruling just made bullying legal for a while. But how long will American stand for it?