This is not likely of any general interest, but the Supreme Court just released its important Citizens United v. FEC opinion.  It discusses tensions between democratic elections and the First Amendment.  As a citizen, a writer, and an attorney, I take special note of those topics.  I also happen to respect and agree with Justice John Paul Stevens – he’s a good and readable writer – so here’s a selection of quotes from his dissenting opinion.

• “The Court’s ruling . . . dramatically enhances the role of corporations and unions . . . in determining who will hold public office.”
• “Starting today, corporations with large war chests to deploy on electioneering may find democratically elected bodies becoming much more attuned to their interests.”
• “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”
• “[I]n a functioning democracy the public must have faith that its representatives owe their positions to the people, not to the corporations with the deepest pockets.”
• “A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”
• “Pervading the Court’s analysis is the ominous image of a ‘categorical ban’ on corporate speech.  Indeed, the majority invokes the specter of a ‘ban’ on nearly every page of its opinion.  This characterization is highly misleading, and needs to be corrected.”
• “Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”
• “Unlike our colleagues, [the Framers] had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.”
• “The word ‘soulless’ constantly recurs in debates over corporations. . . . Corporations, it was feared, could concentrate the worst urges of whole groups of men.  Thomas Jefferson famously fretted that corporations would subvert the Republic.”
• “The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it.”
• “It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.  Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction.  But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”
• “It is an interesting question ‘who’ is even speaking when a business corporation places an advertisement that endorses or attacks a particular candidate.  Presumably it is not the customers or employees, who typically have no say in such matters.  It cannot realistically be said to be the shareholders, who tend to be far removed from the day-to-day decisions of the firm and whose political preferences may be opaque to management.  Perhaps the officers or directors of the corporation have the best claim to be the ones speaking, except their fiduciary duties generally prohibit them from using corporate funds for personal ends.  Some individuals associated with the corporation must make the decision to place the ad, but the idea that these individuals are thereby fostering their self expression or cultivating their critical faculties is fanciful.”
• “Corporations, as a class, tend to be more attuned to the complexities of the legislative process and more directly affected by tax and appropriations measures that receive little public scrutiny; they also have vastly more money with which to try to buy access and votes.
• “In an age in which money and television ads are the coin of the campaign realm, it is hardly surprising that corporations deployed these ads to curry favor with, and to gain influence over, public officials.”
• “Corruption can take many forms.  Bribery may be the paradigm case.  But the difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind.  And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.  Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority’s apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences does not accord with the theory or reality of politics.  It certainly does not accord with the record Congress developed . . . that stands as a remarkable testament to the energy and ingenuity with which corporations, unions, lobbyists, and politicians may go about scratching each other’s backs . . . .”
• “Corporate ‘domination’ of electioneering . . . can generate the impression that corporations dominate our democracy.  When citizens turn on their televisions and radios before an election and hear only corporate electioneering, they may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy.  A Government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing.”
• “To the extent that corporations are allowed to exert undue influence in electoral races, the speech of the eventual winners of those races may also be chilled.  Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation.”
• “The majority declares by fiat that the appearance of undue influence by high-spending corporations ‘will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.’  The electorate itself has consistently indicated otherwise, both in opinion polls . . . and in the laws its representatives have passed, and our colleagues have no basis for elevating their own optimism into a tenet of constitutional law.”

I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.