Saturday Cartoons - All The Justice Money Can Buy (And Religion Too!)

Featuring the five Republican Justices.

(click to enlarge)

(Darrin Bell, via gocomics.com)

(Jeff Danziger, via gocomics.com)

(Jen Sorensen, via gocomics.com)

Monday Reading - "Send In The Oligarchs"

We're still seething about the recent Roberts Republican Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon, which further battered the seawall protecting American democracy from a Republican-led oligarch surge.  E.J. Dionne has a piece worth reading today.  Here's an excerpt:

Those using the word “oligarchy” to describe the political regime the Supreme Court is creating are not doing so lightly. Combine McCutcheon with the decision in the Citizens United case and you can see that the court is systematically transferring more power to a tiny, privileged sliver of our people. [snip] 

In his McCutcheon opinion, [Chief Justice John] Roberts piously declares: “There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.” This lovely commitment escaped him entirely last summer when he and his allies threw out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Suddenly, efforts to protect the right of minorities “to participate in electing our political leaders” took second place behind all manner of worries about how Congress had constructed the law. The decision unleashed a frenzy in Republican-controlled states to pass laws that make it harder for African Americans, Latinos and poor people to vote. 

Thus has this court conferred on wealthy people the right to give vast sums of money to politicians while undercutting the rights of millions of citizens to cast a ballot. 

Send in the oligarchs.  (our emphasis)

The moral and intellectual dishonesty of Roberts and his Republican cohorts should come as no surprise to any observer of the Court.  We already know, thanks to the Roberts Republican Court's ruling in Citizens United, that corporations are people (political seer Millionaire Mitt Romney was right after all!). That's why we won't plotz when they allow Hobby Lobby (as they surely will) to claim religious conscience rights otherwise reserved for, you know, people, in order to avoid providing contraception coverage to employees.

All to reinforce the point (as Grung_e_Gene reminds us) that right wingers never concede defeat and no progressive advancement can ever be considered safe; and to further reinforce the point that progressives can never rest on their laurels and have to fight the reactionaries with skill and stamina.  Good policy and good intentions are no guarantee of success when arrayed against radical reactionaries determined to undermine American democracy.

BONUS:  See how the McCutcheon ruling makes Congress a corruption-prosecution-free zone.

Setback for Cleaner Politics

In a significant boost to the influence of money in politics, the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court struck down the aggregate limits on Federal campaign contributions.  In their opinion, the Justices said that the overall cap on combined contributions to Federal candidates was a violation of the First Amendment.  That means while an individual's contributions to a specific candidate remain capped at $2,600, the limit that an individual can contribute to all Federal candidates ($48,600) or a party campaign ($74,600) no longer applies.

Public Citizen's Robert Weissman reacted to the ruling by saying,

"This is truly a decision establishing plutocrat rights. The Supreme Court today holds that the purported right of a few hundred superrich individuals to spend outrageously large sums on campaign contributions outweighs the national interest in political equality and a government free of corruption." 

America's tycoons (like the one that brought the suit, wing nut businessman Shaun McCutcheon) believe they have the right to buy politicians who will do their bidding while in office.  That was why a century ago, political reformists including President Theodore Roosevelt tried to limit the role of the plutocrats in politics.  The ruling by the Roberts Court moves us closer to those days of the corrupting influence of big money.