Litigation

Citizens United: A Debate-Changer About our Courts?

By Peter Hardin

(Supreme Court photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

Has Citizens United altered the debate over the future of our courts?

That question is posed by Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, in Huffington Post. Kendall argues that the case has already led to changes, saying that:

• President Obama has accelerated from a slow pace for picking judicial nominees to a faster tempo and is even getting some pushback for going too far in criticizing the Supreme Court. (One person partly endorsing this last point was Justice at Stake executive director Bert Brandenburg, who suggested in Gavel Grab that nationally televised criticism could unleash a politically motivated backlash.)
• Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, now has fellow Democrats on the panel singing from the same page as a progressive message about the courts that Leahy delivered when supporting then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.
• Senate Republicans are “stung by opposition to Citizens United from their most ardent supporters” and can say little more than the ruling wasn’t as awful as it’s been described.

Kendall calls it a “very bad” ruling but he concludes:

“[F]or Americans who care about the future of the courts, as everyone should, Citizens United at least has the silver lining of having changed everything in that conversation, and focused a laser-like spotlight on rulings by the Roberts Court that sharply depart from our Constitution’s text and history.”

Kendall’s group has released a report entitled, “A Capitalist Joker: The Strange Origins, Disturbing Past and Uncertain Future of Corporate Personhood in American Law.”

Some analysts and commentators still think the brouhaha over Citizens United is overblown, however. Jeff Norman writes commentary elsewhere in Huffington Post headlined, “Liberals Overreact to Citizens United.” A report from Corporate Counsel is entitled, “So Far, They’re Just Not Buyin’ It: Companies Hold Off on Political Ads.”

Whether the public will know it if corporations step up spending on independent advertising is a serious question raised by a comprehensive ProPublica article. It is headlined, “Higher Corporate Spending on Political Ads Could be All but Invisible.”

For more coverage of Citizens United, click here.

Full post as published by The Gavel on March 12, 2010 (boomark / email).