Money Is Speech: Why the Citizens United v. FEC Ruling Is Bad for Politics and the Market

IN LATE January, a bare majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment bars most restrictions on corporate expenditures to influence political elections. The decision, which turned the First Amendment on its head, was based on a simple syllogism: Corporate spending is speech; restricting speech is censorship; therefore, restricting corporate spending to influence elections is censorship and is banned by the First Amendment.

The syllogism is powerful—so powerful, in fact, that five members of the Court felt it justified overruling two major Supreme Court precedents and ... More

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Why the Sotomayor Hearings were Disappointing

WILL SOMEBODY out there say it please: The hearings that were supposed to provide insight into Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s suitability for the United States Supreme Court were a disgrace and an outrage. Not just the Republican bloviators posturing for the cameras and toadying to their right-wing constituency, not just the Democratic yea-sayers singing the judge’s praises and feeding her softballs and sweet talk, but Sotomayer herself.

I have no doubt that Sonia Sotomayor is a remarkable woman, nor do I fail to appreciate that hers is an inspiring story.  But am I the only one who t... More

How the Supreme Court's Ruling on Ricci v. DeStefano Hints at Trouble Ahead

THE SUPREME Court’s decision last month in the Ricci case involving New Haven’s test for promoting firefighters is important for two reasons (three, perhaps, if you include the likely quite transient effect on the Senate’s debate over the seemingly inevitable confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor).  One is the decision’s implication for employment discrimination law.  The other is what it shows us about the strategy of Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues for achieving their long-run goals—if we let them get away with it.

Both Justice Anthony K... More

Resurrecting Bush v. Gore

To the extent Democrats think about Bush v. Gore these days, they remember it as the worst Supreme Court decision in decades—a nakedly partisan ruling by five conservative justices hell-bent on installing George W. Bush in the White House. Bush v. Gore was all this and more, but it also recognized, for the first time, a powerful progressive principle: that all voters in a state, and all ballots they cast, should be treated equally whenever elections are held. It was precisely because Flori... More

Voters Get Carded

The Supreme Court recently ruled that states can require citizens to present a picture ID before they vote. Indiana provided the test case, and the rule now is that if voters don’t show a picture ID, they won’t be allowed to vote. The ostensible reason for this requirement is the need to prevent voter fraud. But everyone knows that this isn’t the real reason, and the Justices acknowledged that no evidence of extensive voter fraud in the absence of picture IDs had been presented. In any case, serious fraud isn’t the work of individual voters but of corrupt officials, who won’t find the new r... More

1869 Redux: Gender and Race Politics in the Democr

On January 13, long before Super Tuesday, the New York Times ran an article titled “Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course” that sought to put in historical perspective the struggle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Illustrating the Times article were large pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, resurrected from the dead to replay for today’s electorate the one moment when their long and otherwise collegial careers in American reform led them into conflict: the 1869 battle over the exclusion of women from the Fifteenth Amendment, which e... More

The Right to Shoot: A Modest Proposal

The Supreme Court recently heard arguments about what Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times (March 19, 2008) called “the right to own a gun for personal use.” At issue is a District of Columbia ban on handguns, which the Court is expected to overturn when it rules. Solicitor General Paul Clement is worried that the justices may go so far as to undermine existing federal restrictions on machine guns; he urged a cautious decision, claiming that “reasonable restrictions on firearms” were in place at the time the constitution was adopted (but not saying what those were).

Machin... More

Who Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

LIKE SO many of my generation who did voter registration work in the South during the 1960s, I have been saddened by the debate that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparked over whether Martin Luther King or President Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in hiring and public accommodations.  Instead of providing voters ... More