Al Franken/S.Whitehouse to speak out on the dangers of corporate/private powers

[Dover]

This week's hearings over Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court will mark a sea change in the way liberals argue about the judiciary.

Democratic senators (Al Franken, Sheldon Whitehouse) are planning to put the right of citizens to challenge corporate power at the center of their critique of activist conservative judging, offering a case that has not been fully aired since the days of the great Progressive Era Justice Louis Brandeis.

It was Brandeis who warned against the "concentration of economic power" and observed that "so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state."

..snip..

Corporations hate juries," Whitehouse said. "It's the one part of government you can't buy." He will link this argument with a challenge to the Supreme Court's appalling Citizens United decision, which gives corporations virtually unlimited rights to spend money to influence elections. Invoking the baseball-umpire metaphor made popular by Roberts, Whitehouse observed that "corporations have a different strike zone in the Supreme Court than regular people."

Franken previewed his approach in a powerful speech to the American Constitution Society this month that has made conservatives unhappy. Franken argued that the right has dominated the judicial debate by suggesting that "the Court's rulings don't matter to ordinary people" through a focus on cases involving late-term abortion, flag-burning and pornography.

The time has come, Franken said in an interview, for progressives to recognize that Roe v. Wade has distracted attention from what is now at the heart of the judicial controversy: the ability of individuals to assert their rights against corporations.


cont'd

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/27/AR2010062703527.html

---------------------------------------------------------


So Kagan is a progressive liberal???


More political theatre? Talk is about as valuable as the declining dollar. Action, dear Congress.... ACTION!

[jp11]

1. I thought Senator Franken did an excellent job making that point

during his intro in the hearing today. Wish we had more people like him in the government.