Thursday, February 23, 2012

The Supreme Court and the effects of Citizens United

Many times Republicans like to brag about the fact that everything should be either handled by the states or even locally.
Not necessarily when it favors their interests.
They always talk about how justices in the Supreme Court should not legislate from the bench.
We are now living with one of the most overreaching supreme courts in a generation.
This started with the election of Bush/Gore and their decision to choose a winner, by stopping the recount, probably because they feared that Bush could end up being the looser.
In 2010 they overturned a decision that was over 100 years old with Citizens United to allow unlimited corporate money in elections, with no disclosures, no traces. Republicans like to say that corporations are people. I don't know where in the Constitution it says that. And because of that they should be able to spend unlimited amounts of money to decide elections.
A few days ago they blocked the state of Montana from being able to enforce their own legislation that does not allow corporations to fund elections. Here we go with the overreaching.
They had already legislated from the bench in the Citizens United case, so that the 1% of the population have more saying in the election than the other 99%.
It is wonderful to see the Republican Candidates how they are now “suffering” the consequences of this wrong decision from this Supreme Court, with negative adds that have only turned off people in the states where primaries are being conducted.
2010 saw many states being hijacked by neo-conservatives with the help of Citizens United, and I say hijacked because Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, Michigan, and Florida, to name a few are being run down to the ground by the few at the expense of the many, with legislation that they never disclosed they would pass once in office. In Wisconsin and Ohio union busting and the elimination of negotiation, in Michigan of the governor disallowing local elections by appointing viceroys of his choosing, in Florida by destroying education, and in Virginia by trying to pass legislation that would force women who would want to terminate a pregnancy to be do a trans-vaginal ultrasound with a probe.
Talk about lets reduce government in our lives. Republicans in power are overreaching in all aspects, they want to know what you do in your bedroom, with whom, and when. They want to legislate people’s every moves. We cannot forget either that their goal is always to cut taxes, not for the average Joe but for the friends who financed their campaigns, same thing with regulations, and then we end up in a total meltdown like the one we suffered in 2008. Governor Christie in NJ wants to reduce taxes, he says. To the average family it will probably represent a few hundred dollars a year. What he should focus on is in how to give property tax relief to the families of this state, not benefit the 1% of the population. That will not revive the economy, if that is his "supposedly" goal.
Republicans always say that the government should not choose winners and losers. Ironic because that's what they have been doing in every place where they can get their hands on. They believe in corporate welfare, at the expense of everybody else, they say that we should lower taxes and broaden the base, in lame English it means lower the taxes for the wealthy and start taxing low income people to make up for the loss in revenue, so that people like my daughter who work for minimum wage pay income taxes as well. Their policies for the last 30 years have caused the near annihilation of the middle class. And when the rest of us say we need assistance they always say that there isn’t any money.

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