Juan Cole: Could a Post-Scalia Court Restore Campaign Finance Sanity--

[eridani]

--& Pull Back From Plutocracy?

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35212-focus-could-a-post-scalia-court-restore-campaign-finance-sanity-a-pull-back-from-plutocracy

The craziness of our political season stems in part from equating money to speech and removing restrictions on campaign donations. In the old days, because of more effective campaign finance rules, in order to run for president you had to get the backing of a whole gaggle of people. If you said a few embarrassing things, as Donald Trump has (in spades!), in the old days the gaggle would peel away. Since the rules didn’t allow you just to buy the election by yourself, you’d be forced to drop out if even your backers thought you were batcrap crazy. But now, with billionaires self-financing or with billionaires putting in dark money, the guano insane can stay in the race indefinitely. In some instances, addled plutocrats like Sheldon Adelson install a voice pull-string in their puppet candidates (Robo Rubio is Adelson’s toy), forcing them to parrot nonsensical sentences over and over again. Or Haim Saban makes Hillary give that ridiculous AIPAC speech over and over again about Israel, which bears no resemblance to reality.

Citzens United was another one of those 5-4 decisions, and a new, less hard line justice would allow the court to chip away at it and even just overturn it.

There is no guarantee that the court can or will take a new direction now. But it could. And if it does, then we 99% could maybe get our country back.

[countryjake]

1. K&R!