The Wages of Citizens United: The Courts.

“When the Chief Judge joined in the argument about the continuing vitality of the corruption rationale for campaign finance restraints, he flatly accused Kolker of evading the Citizens United ruling. “I’m not hearing you address Citizens United,” Sentelle said. And Judge Thomas B. Griffith chimed in: “You’re trying to avoid Citizens United. This is a new world: corruption means a lot less than it did before.'”Hey, you said it, Judge. According to the good folks at SCOTUSblog, the doors to unfettered campaign cash are open in a big way in the minds of the DC District Court after Citizens United: “From the opening moment of the 65-minute hearing, most of the nine judges on the en banc Court treated the Supreme Court’s ruling…as the beginning, not the end, of expansion of those freedoms. When an FEC lawyer tried to bring up, and rely on, older precedents, he was reminded repeatedly that those came before Citizens United.“

President Obama’s stern words about the decision in his State of the Union address may have induced Justice Alito to expose himself as a partisan hack, but it seems, alas, that the Justice and his four conservative contemporaries will have the last laugh.

The Wages of Citizens United: The $$$.

“The Chamber spent much of its money in 2009 on campaigns that worked — it scared the Senate away from considering a version of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation, and an argument can be made that its cutting ads on health care (with money taken from some insurance companies) helped to undercut support for the legislation.” You think? In a shape-of-things-to-come moment even before Citizens United goes into effect, the Chamber of Commerce outspent both political parties in 2009.

“According to The Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its national subsidiaries spent $144.5 million in 2009, far more than the RNC and more than double the expenditures by the DNC.” But corporate spending isn’t a problem or anything.

The Wages of Citizens United: The People.

“In a new national poll, 65 percent of Americans say they disagree with the 5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to spend without limits on ads in political campaigns.” And yet hope remains while the company is true: A new poll finds Americans across the board are unhappy with the court’s ruling in Citizens United.

“The Reid poll found little difference in partisan attitudes…Sixty-six percent of Democrats either “moderately” or “strongly” disagreed with the ruling, but so did 63 percent of Republicans. A whopping 72 percent of Independents disagreed with the Supremes’ decision.” One wonders how those numbers might’ve moved if we started using Citizen United’s full name to discuss this case…

You stay classy, GOP. And folks thought “teabagger” was ugly.

SotU: The “Fetal Position” Fallacy.

“I know that we haven’t agreed on every issue thus far, and there are surely times in the future when we will part ways. But I also know that every American who is sitting here tonight loves this country and wants it to succeed. That must be the starting point for every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done. That is the foundation on which the American people expect us to build common ground.“

They do? I thought they expected change we can believe in. But worn-out nods to an elusive, ephemeral, and, given the current GOP, often undesirable bipartisanship does not constitute such. In any event, so concluded the President’s State of the Union address last Thursday. This is old news at this point, so I’ll keep it brief. Suffice to say, while it got better as it went along, I thought the speech was merely ok, and often troubling. Throughout the evening, the president’s remarks had that excessively-poll-tested, small-bore feel that conjured up grim odors of 1995 and 1996. Throw on a flannel and fire up the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, y’all: One year into the Obama era, are we already back to V-chips and school uniforms?

Part of the president’s problem is that the Senate is looking like the elephant’s graveyard of progressive-minded legislation right now. The president called for an energy reform bill. The House went out on a limb to pass one last June. The president called for a financial reform bill. The House passed one in December. The president called for a new jobs bill. The House also passed one in December. All of these bills, and many, many others, are languishing in the Senate right now, as Sen. Reid and others try to figure out how to somehow get something — anything! — passed with a larger majority than Dubya ever enjoyed.

The Senate issue aside, there were other problems in the President’s speech, including far too many nods and feints in the direction of ridiculous deficit peacocks like Judd Gregg and Evan Bayh. First off, at the risk of sounding like Dick Cheney, I tend to think that deficits are troubling, but, even in the best of times, they shouldn’t really be the foremost driving concern of our government policy. If we run a deficit to invest in education now, we’ll save money down the road and improve Americans’ quality-of-life to boot. (Put in somewhat ugly fashion, it’s invest in schools now or prisons later.)

And that being said, right now is emphatically not the best of times. We know exactly what happens when you cut spending too quickly after a virulent recession — It was called the 1937 Roosevelt recession, and it would be flagrantly idiotic to repeat it. Just because the GOP doesn’t seem to understand basic Keynesian economics doesn’t mean we should follow them down the rabbit hole of flat-earth thinking, just so we can look bipartisan.

No, the problem with deficits isn’t necessarily the running of a deficit. It’s the running-up of massive deficits for patently stupid reasons — like, say, prosecuting a war of choice in Iraq, or doling out excessive tax breaks to multi-millionaires. And that’s why some of the President’s nods in that direction were so irritating last Thursday. Calling for a spending freeze on discretionary spending, without touching the exorbitant “security-related” budget (cute euphemism, that), is kabuki theater at best. And at worst, you’re balancing the books at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens. (I tend to agree with Candidate Obama on this issue anyway.)

Similarly, this deficit commission which the president plans to foist on Congress by executive order after the Senate killed it, is, again, at best kabuki theater and at worst trouble. It’s clear to everyone involved that the entire point of this commission is CYA: i.e, to create political cover for raids on entitlement spending, while once again ignoring the grotesquely swollen defense budget. (Altho’, to be fair, Secretary Gates has at least tried to rein in growth in this sector.) In other words, this commission will basically just be a chance for deficit peacocks to pretend they’re Serious People and “make tough decisions,” while in fact the one really tough idea that actually needs to be tackled — reining in defense spending — will be completely avoided.

In any event, all this discussion of the deficit ignores the larger problem. Obviously, one of the president’s biggest charges coming into office was to restore economic sanity after eight years of Dubyaite excess. That being said, people were not looking to President Obama for this sort of deficit tsk-tsking and small-bore, fiddling around the margins. You’d think we Dems would have learned this by now. But curling up into a fetal position and mouthing moderate GOP-lite bromides will not stop the Republicans from kicking us, ever.

We have a Democratic president, an 18-seat majority in the Senate, and a 79-seat majority in the House. In short, we Dems need to keep thinking big or we will pay dearly at the polls this November. Perhaps the dysfunction of the Senate is the central problem Obama faces right now, but his speech nonetheless suggests that we’re getting dangerously close to Eisenhower Republican territory now, and not even in the good “the military-industrial complex is completely frakked” kinda way. Without vision, the people perish. So too will our party, if we keep up with this thin gruel, triangulation schtick. At the advice of the careerist DLC-types over the years, we have tried this path several times over — Put simply, it does not work.

When Suddenly a Debate Broke Out.

“The whole thing basically went like that: Republican asks obnoxious question rooted in Glenn Beck-ian talking points; Obama swats it away, makes the questioner look silly, and then smiles at the end. It got so bad, in fact, that Fox News cut away from the event before it was over.”

My issues with the SotU notwithstanding, the president’s sallying back-and-forth with House Republicans on Friday clearly indicate that, whatever our problems are within the party, the GOP are just not ready for prime-time right now. (I also get the sense that this will mark the definitive end of the Republican’s goofy “teleprompter” meme.) [Full transcript.]

To his credit, the president made his political opponents seem like the blatantly hypocritical ideologues they in fact are. Which begs the “common ground” question once again: Why should we try to meet the “Party of No” halfway, particularly when we know that they move the goalposts every single time you try to take them seriously?

Lo, Here Comes the Flood.

“The Court today rejects a century of history when it treats the distinction between corporate and individual campaign spending as an invidious novelty born of Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U. S. 652 (1990). Relying largely on individual dissenting opinions, the majority blazes through our precedents, overruling or disavowing a body of case law…The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.“

Well, it was a nice republic while it lasted. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court finally hands down its Citzens United verdict, and it is ugly. [Full Text] Basically, the distinction between corporations and individuals has been erased, and, by the already dubious proposition that money is speech, unlimited corporate expenditures in campaigns is now just good, old-fashioned government. Welcome to the new Lochner era, y’all.

By the way, this is a much, much bigger deal than Scott Brown or the effing Edwards baby. Not that you’d know that from watching the news right now.

Update: More reactions:

Fred Wertheimer, Democracy 21: “Today’s Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case is a disaster for the American people and a dark day for the Supreme Court…With a stroke of the pen, five Justices wiped out a century of American history devoted to preventing corporate corruption of our democracy.“

Bob Edgar, Common Cause: “The Roberts Court today made a bad situation worse. This decision allows Wall Street to tap its vast corporate profits to drown out the voice of the public in our democracy. The path from here is clear: Congress must free itself from Wall Street’s grip so Main Street can finally get a fair shake.“

Robert Weissman, Public Citizen: “Shed a tear for our democracy…Money from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the policy making process in Washington, state capitals and city halls. Today, the Supreme Court tells these corporate giants that they have a constitutional right to trample our democracy.“

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI): “[T]his decision was a terrible mistake. Presented with a relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was president. Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns. Just six years ago, the Court said that the prohibition on corporations and unions dipping into their treasuries to influence campaigns was ‘firmly embedded in our law.’ Yet this Court has just upended that prohibition, and a century’s worth of campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in government. The American people will pay dearly for this decision when, more than ever, their voices are drowned out by corporate spending in our federal elections.“

President Obama: “With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.“

Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick: “Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is ‘to confuse metaphor with reality.’ Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.“

Brownian Motion.

So, slow news evening, eh?

Well, first off, thanks, Massachusetts! To my many friends from the Bay State, I say this: Speaking as a son of South Carolina, I never, ever want to get the “you-hicks-are-keeping-us-back” routine from y’all again, thanks much.

So, yes, Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. And thus, in a truly bitter irony, a man who spent his life trying to achieve health care reform for all Americans has now been replaced by a guy sworn to kill the health care bill and armed with the 41st vote(?) that could potentially make it happen. (Yes, Virginia, it’s true. In our system, 41 > 59.) Well, in Brown’s defense, he has a nice truck.

Why did this happen? Well, everybody has a theory. Here’s mine, which boils down to two reasons.

1. Martha Coakley. I didn’t watch enough of the MA race to determine if she was a lousy candidate through-and-through, although I have my suspicions. Nonetheless, Ms. Coakley was undeniably a gaffe-prone standard-bearer. From calling Curt Schilling a Yankee to misspelling the name of the state in a political ad to, weirdly, insulting the very idea of glad-handing in public, Coakley was an out-and-out gaffe machine. Couple that with a lackadaisical campaign and the inexplicable decision to take an extended vacation in the heat of the race, and you have a recipe for disaster. There’s a reason we’ve been telling the story of the Tortoise and the Hare for a couple thousand years now.

2. Change. In fending off Rahm Emanuel’s charge that she’s at fault for this fiasco, pollster Celinda Lake aptly summed up the main problem here: ““If Scott Brown wins tonight he’ll win because he became the change-oriented candidate. Voters are still voting for the change they voted for in 2008, but they want to see it.” Put another way: All across the country, the current occupants of the White House tapped into a deep and strongly-felt yearning for a transformative presidency in 2008…and then spent pretty much the entirety of their first-year in office playing the same old tired in-the-Beltway reindeer games that made people ill in the first place. This is not change voters believed in, and it has made voters angry, or depressed, or both.

Equally demoralizing is the neverending spectacle of a stalled-out health care bill. If I’d hazard a guess, most voters aren’t really delving into the ins and outs of this all-consuming debate, particularly by Month Eight or whatever it is. But they can see just from casually following along that the Democrats are really struggling to get this done, that the White House has been letting the bill get bogged down and eviscerated in the Senate — first in August, and again in November/December — and that, from the Big Pharma deal to the disappearing public option to all of the Lieberman/Stupak/Nelson/Snowe shenanigans on display, the usual Washington rules are in full effect right now. Once again, this is not change people can believe in. With each passing month that the bill has languished, we Dems have looked weaker and weaker. And if you continually force voters to choose between venal and incompetent, they’ll tend to gravitate toward the former.

Now, the good news: 1. First, and this cannot be stressed enough, we have an 18-seat majority in the Senate. It’s 59-41 people…most presidents can only dream of having that kind of majority, Dubya included. So there’s really no good reason — none, zip, zero — that we shouldn’t see more progressive accomplishments from this administration in the year to come. It just takes an act of will. I don’t remember the Republicans getting all kerfuffled about operating with 51 votes. Nor did Hubert Humphrey and the Johnson Senate have any problem with blithely ignoring the Senate parliamentarian when it got in the way of legislation.

2. It’s January of 2010, i.e. almost a full year before the “real” election day. In other words, this Brown victory is really just a shot across the bow. And if the administration course-corrects now, we may even end up gaining a year in time — and several seats we might well have lost — had this lazy centrist drift continued on until next November.

Of course, that’s only good news if the administration and the Democratic Party draw the right lessons from yesterday’s defeat. Suffice to say, this afternoon, it does not look good: Enabled, as usual, by the Serious People™ who comprise the broken-down wreck we once called beltway journalism, all the usual suspects are currently blaming Coakley’s loss on “the Left,” or more specifically the hippie-liberal cast of Obama’s administration thus far. Uh, say what now?

It’s hard to answer this ridiculous charge any better than did the estimable Glenn Greenwald this afternoon: “‘In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by ‘the Left,’ let alone ‘the furthest left elements” of the Party? As Ezra Klein says, the Left ‘ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months’….The very idea that an administration run by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel and staffed with centrists, Wall Street mavens, and former Bush officials — and a Congress beholden to Blue Dogs and Lieberdems — has been captive ‘to the Left’ is so patently false that everyone should be too embarrassed to utter it.“

Truer words and all that. If we want to stop seeing these sorts of Brownian upsets in the future, the answer is emphatically not to curl up within the usual GOP-lite protective camouflage and hope the flak dies down. People see through that malarkey immediately. (As Harry Truman is rumored to have said, “In an election between a Republican and a Republican, the Republican wins every time.“) No, the answer is to move forward from this point with the courage of our convictions, and to start delivering to American families the real and fundamental change they were promised a year ago. It’s just that simple, folks.

The Trouble With Harry.

“Mr. Ford spoke about his childhood in Memphis, describing a grandmother who used the extension cords from living room lamps to discipline him and his brother. ‘I am always amazed when I meet parents who say they can’t get their kids to go to church, ’cause I didn’t know kids had options like that…Later, he returned to the subject: ‘We as a nation need to be disciplined. If there were ever a day in which an electric cord ought to be used on all of us to remind us of what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s on the King holiday.'”

Speaking of exactly the direction Dems don’t need to go after yesterday’s’ Massachusetts thumping, consider Harold Ford, who (with some not-insubstantial Wall Street prodding) has up and decided he wants to be the Senator from New York, and who, among his many, many other faults, cannot seem to wrap his mind around either the basic fundamentals of capitalism or Dr. King’s doctrine of non-violence.

As I said on Twitter the other day, Harold Ford may not represent *everything* that’s wrong with the Dems, because we’ve got lots of problems right now. But he’s darn close.

The Perils of LCD Politics.

“I don’t honestly know what this president believes. But I believe if he doesn’t figure it out soon, start enunciating it, and start fighting for it, he’s not only going to give American families hungry for security a series of half-loaves where they could have had full ones, but he’s going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they’re seeing right now is ‘liberalism,’ and they don’t like what they see. I don’t, either. What’s they’re seeing is weakness, waffling, and wandering through the wilderness without an ideological compass. That’s a recipe for going nowhere fast — but getting there by November.“

I already said my piece about this last week, and was going to let it drop for now. But this long essay by Drew Westen on the problems with Obama’s leadership so far is right on the nose and well worth-reading. “[W]hat Democrats just can’t seem to understand is that the politics of the lowest common denominator is always a losing politics. It sends a meta-message that you’re weak — nothing more, nothing less — and that’s the cross the Democrats have had to bear since they ‘lost China’ 60 years ago. And in fact, it is weak.“

The Myth of 11-Dimensional Chess.

“Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional ‘centrists.’ Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.“

A day after Senate Democrats kill Byron Dorgan’s non-importation amendment in order to preserve the administration’s back-door deal with Big Pharma, the indispensable Glenn Greenwald takes the Obama administration to task for the final Senate product on health care, which, suffice to say, is looking pretty far afield from the House bill. (And all the while, the bought and paid for Joe Lieberman grins like the Cheshire Cat.)

I was going to wait until year-in-review post week to put this up, but now’s as good a time as any: From civil liberties to this Senate health care fiasco, it’s hard to think of any arena where this administration’s first year hasn’t been a tremendous disappointment. (Regarding the former: I didn’t mention this here earlier, but the brazen audacity of this passage from the president’s war-is-peace Nobel Prize speech made me blanch: “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor — we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.” Uh, your Justice Department is not upholding them, remember? Is the president even aware of his own civil liberties record?)

Anyway, I keep being reminded of this line from my Obama endorsement of January 2008: “There’s a possibility — maybe even a strong possibility — that he’ll end up a Tommy Carcetti-like president: a well-meaning reformer outmatched and buffeted to and fro by the entrenched forces arrayed against him.” Well, welcome to the Carcetti presidency, y’all. The only surprise so far for many of us is in how little he’s actually even tried to enact meaningful reforms. But I guess once the president surrounded himself with the exact same GOP-lite people we’d spent months trying to defeat in the Democratic primary, the writing should have been on the wall. This will not be change we can believe in. A New Day is not dawning. And the president is not really with us — We’re going to have to do the heavy lifting for reform next year without him.