Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The Supreme Court’s Ideology: More Money, Less Voting - Ari Bermanon

In the past four years, under the leadership of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has made it far easier to buy an election and far harder to vote in one.

The Court’s conservative majority believes that the First Amendment gives wealthy donors and powerful corporations the carte blanche right to buy an election but that the Fifteenth Amendment does not give Americans the right to vote free of racial discrimination.

These are not unrelated issues—the same people, like the Koch brothers, who favor unlimited secret money in US elections are the ones funding the effort to make it harder for people to vote. The net effect is an attempt to concentrate the power of the top 1 percent in the political process and to drown out the voices and votes of everyone else.

A country that expands the rights of the powerful to dominate the political process but does not protect fundamental rights for all citizens doesn’t sound much like a functioning democracy to me.

The full article is available here