By a vote of 5-4 (Justice O’Connor the swing vote as expected), the Supreme Court upheld the McCain–Feingold soft-money ban today in McConnell v. FEC. Well, Scalia may call this a “sad day for the freedom of speech,” but I for one think this is great, great news. “Money, like water, will always find an outlet,” as the majority put it, but at least the highest Court in the land has now recognized the corrosive impact of unregulated loot on the political process. This decision will hopefully do much to disentangle the pernicious conflation of speech and money in Buckley v. Valeo, and set the stage for continued meaningful campaign finance reform in the years to come. While McConnell v. FEC doesn’t eliminate the bad taste of Bush v. Gore, it is a huge step in the right direction by this Court.
One thought on “Woohoo!”
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Scalia is so full of shit. “I’m so high and mighty… I care so much about people’s constitutional rights… i think it’s more important that people be able to constitutionally fuck up the election process than have sex with people they care about…”
this doesn’t have anything to do with the right to criticize the government. people can still criticize what they want, whenever they want. it just deals with the right to drown out other criticism through massive amounts of money. scalia bugs me. not everything he rules on is a clear cut moral issue.