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Move To Amend
There are only three ways to undo a bad Supreme Court decision. All three have been used at various times.
he first is to wait until the composition of the Court changes – one or more of the bad judges retires or dies and is replaced by others more competent. (It’s worth noting that even former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Ronald Reagan appointee and longtime Republican activist, condemned the Citizens United ruling.) Then the Court takes on a case that involves the same issues, and like with Brown v. Board or Roe v. Wade decisions, pushes the court forward in time.
The second is for the American people, the President, and Congress to understand the horror of the consequences of such a decision, and break with the Court.
Arguably this happened with the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which ruled that black persons were actually property, and thus led us directly into the Civil War. That Supreme Court decision led to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of legislation clarifying the rights of African Americans, although it ultimately took a war and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to purge slavery from our laws and our Constitution.
Ironically, the Citizens United case is the mirror of Dred Scott in that it ruled that a property – a corporation – is now a person.
The third way to undo – or supersede – a Supreme Court decision is to amend the Constitution itself so the Court can no longer play word games with ambiguous or broadly-worded language. We did this, for example, to both institute and then to repeal the prohibition, manufacture and sale of alcohol.
The Constitutional amendment route seems the most practical and long lasting, even though it may be the most challenging.
We must be very careful that any amendment put forth isn’t just limited to giving Congress the power to regulate campaign spending; to do so would leave a wide swath of other Bill of Rights powers in the hands of corporations. Instead, an amendment must explicitly overturn the headnote to the Santa Clara County 1886 decision that asserted corporations are the same as natural persons in terms of constitutional protections.
By doing this, we can begin the transition back from a corporate oligarchic state to the constitutionally limited representative democratic republic our Founders envisioned.
Learn more about the reasons for dissenting to the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling in chapter ten, "Wal-Mart Is Not A Person!", of " Rebooting the American Dream".(On Kindle too) |
