Hightower Lowdown

"For too long," wailed the senator in a heart-tugging cry for justice, "some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process."

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, has never been mistaken for a bleeding-heart liberal, so you can rest assured that his anguish over inequality did not concern the disenfranchisement of minorities or poor people--or any kind of people, for that matter. No, it is the tragic political deprivation faced by America's corporations that moved Mitch to such an outpouring of woe.

And you thought compassionate conservatism was dead.

McConnell was expressing his solidarity with the five Supreme Court justices who ruled on January 21 that our poor corporate citizens are victims of a crass "censorship" unjustly imposed on them by local, state, and national campaign-spending laws. "Let Corporations Speak," chanted the Supreme Five. "Free the Corporate Money," they demanded.

And lo, they made it so. In the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, these five judicial contortionists perverted the Constitution, a century of the Court's own precedents, common sense, logic, and the laws of nature to decree that inanimate, corporate entities must be granted the human right to "speak" in the political arena. Never mind that a corporation is nothing but a legal construct created by the state and has no mouth, tongue, or brain for speaking--the Court fabricated a political voice for these paper inventions by declaring that their money is their language.

Thus, not only can the living, breathing executives of corporations continue dumping millions of their own dollars into elections (money that totaled more than a billion dollars in the 2008 cycle, meaning that corporate interests already possess far and away the most dominant voice in shaping our public policies), but henceforth, the trillions of dollars held by the corporate entities themselves can also be poured into electioneering ads and other forms of "speech." [ read more ]

WHERE IS CONGRESS? It's way past time for members to stand up. Historic matters are at stake. The Constitution is being trampled, the very form of our government is being perverted, and nothing less than American democracy itself is endangered--a presidential coup is taking place. I think of Barbara Jordan, the late congresswoman from Houston. On July 25, 1974, this powerful thinker and member of the House Judiciary Committee took her turn to speak during the Nixon impeachment inquiry.

"My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total," she declared in her thundering voice. "And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution."Where are the likes of Barbara Jordan in today's Congress? While the BushCheney regime continues to establish a supreme, arrogant, autocratic presidency in flagrant violation of the Constitution, members of Congress largely sit there as idle spectators--or worse, as abettors of Bush's usurpation of their own congressional authority.

Why it matters

Separation of powers. Rule of law. Checks and balances. These may seem to us moderns to be little more than a set of dry, legal precepts that we had to memorize in high-school history class but need not concern us now. After all, the founders (bless their wigged heads!) established these principles for us back in 17-something-or-other, so we don't really have to worry about them in 2007. Think again. These are not merely arcane phrases of constitutional law, but the very keystones of our democracy, essential to sustaining our ideal of being a self-governing people, free of tyrants who would govern us on their own whim. The founders knew about tyranny. The monarch of the time, King George III, routinely denied colonists basic liberties, spied on them and entered their homes at will, seized their property, jailed anyone he wanted without charges, rounded up and killed dissidents, and generally ruled with an iron fist. He was both the law and above the law, operating on the twin doctrines of "the divine rule of kings" and "the king can do no wrong." [ read more ]