Needlenose

As you undoubtedly know by now — especially if you’ve had the misfortune to be near a TV tuned to a cable news station in the past 24 hours — al-Qaeda appears to have made another half-hearted plea for relevance, somewhat harebrained in keeping with most of its latter-day attempts at U.S. terrorism (“Let’s send packages with protruding wires from an Arab country to Jewish synagogues in America… no one will suspect a thing!”).

For a demonstration how professionals operate when they want to undermine a democracy, see the Washington Post today:

… new political groups have sprouted like mushrooms in the final weeks of the 2010 campaign, dumping tens of millions of dollars into House and Senate races and, in many cases, avoiding the need to tell voters who is funding their activities.

The frenzy is possible largely because of federal rulings making it easier and more advantageous to set up “super PACs” […] with no limits on fundraising or spending. More than three dozen super PACs and other political groups began spending money for the first time within the past ten days, according to a Washington Post analysis of FEC records.

The surge underscores the outsized role played this year by independent interest groups, which are expected to spend as much $500 million on the midterms. Some political committees are so new they don’t have to reveal details about their backing until after the election; others operating as nonprofits will never have to disclose their donors.

The story by Dan Eggen is accompanied by a broader piece on the radical-right Supreme Court that has enthusiastically facilitated this situation:

Almost from the moment Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the bench five years ago, the court’s conservatives have acted systematically on their deep skepticism of campaign spending restrictions. They repeatedly have questioned the ability of Congress to restrict the role of wealth and special interest involvement in elections without offending the First Amendment guarantee of unfettered political speech. . . .

. . . [Trevor] Potter, now president of the Campaign Legal Center, which supports campaign finance reform [said,]“Citizens United put a Supreme Court good-housekeeping-seal-of-approval on corporations being allowed in elections.”

. . . “While American democracy is imperfect,” [dissenting Justice John Paul] Stevens wrote in his 90-page opinion, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, but colleague Antonin Scalia took up his pen to specifically answer Stevens.

“To exclude or impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy,” he wrote. “We should celebrate rather than condemn the addition of this speech to the public debate.“

I’ll bet you never knew that the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to enshrine the dominance of “the principal agents of the modern free economy,” rather than that silly nonsense about all men being created equal.

I’m sure, though, that future history books will correct this oversight.  Just as soon as education is privatized, just like our elections have been.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

This morning, Josh Marshall spent some time navel-gazing about the Supreme Court decision announced yesterday that questioned the conviction of Enron fraudster Jeffrey Skilling — and, more broadly, challenged the “intangible right to honest services” on which the Skilling verdict was partly based:

To put it very generally, the “honest services” theory allowed a much broader theory of criminal activity than those used in cases of bribery itself. Basically, if I’m working for the people of Kentucky and I’m in effect in the pay of a private interest, I’m depriving the people of the state of “honest services” even if the prosecutor cannot prove, narrowly speaking, that I took a bribe. In short, it makes it much easier for prosecutors to make their case.

The Court unanimously decided to scale back “honest services” and the conservative wing (Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy but not Alito) wanted to get rid of it altogether.

If you’ve followed TPMMuckraker over the last five years, I’d venture to say that the majority, probably the great majority of the public corruption cases we’ve covered relied in whole or in part on “honest services. So if it’s been dramatically curtailed that could undermine a lot of convictions.

I have to assume that those dissenting opinions, in particular, weren’t motivated by jurisprudence (Scalia? Thomas?! Obviously not…) or even ideology so much as an instinct for self-preservation. Strict constitutionalists or not, you gotta think that for the guys who overturned the popular vote in Bush v. Gore — and have since followed that up by determining that the 1st Amendment right to free speech should be weighted by how much money you have in Citizens United, among other atrocities — the last thing in the world they’d want would be an established legal right of the public to “honest services.”

A legal “right” like that could get certain Supreme Court justices in trouble if folks started taking it seriously.

Stuart Taylor, Jr., stalwart defender of oppressed white males

Via Atrios and Adam Serwer at the American Prospect, Stuart Taylor, Jr., of the oh-so-overpriced-respected National Journal has decided to delve into Sonia Sotomayor’s undergraduate student days in hopes of derailing her Supreme Court nomination:

Princeton University was guilty of “an institutional pattern of discrimination” against Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, then-sophomore Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a letter published in the May 10, 1974 edition of the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. [. . .]

. . . Sotomayor’s parents had moved from Puerto Rico to New York in search of better opportunities. Those opportunities ultimately came to include her admission to the university that she so sharply attacked. [. . .]

. . . Some may see the fact that Princeton awarded Sotomayor a summa cum laude degree and the prestigious Pyne Prize when she graduated in 1976 as evidence of her unparalleled brilliance in overcoming a “total absence of regard, concern, and respect” for people such as her.

And some may see Sotomayor’s letter as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities.

Wow. Personally, I look forward to Mr. Taylor extending his investigation of Ms. Sotomayor’s past into her junior high school years. Really, why stop at a letter she wrote when she was 19? Surely she did something earlier in her teens that would disqualify her even more!

Also, although my windbag-to-English translation book isn’t handy at the moment, I wonder what “she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities” really means to Taylor — perhaps something like, “We let you in — shut up and be grateful”?

Apparently, uppity women and minorities make Mr. Taylor uncomfortable by not knowing their place.

(P.S. In a comment on Taylor’s article, Michael Bérubé notes that current Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was a “former member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, the group that was formed as a reaction against the admission of women and minorities in the first place.” No doubt the kind of guy Taylor feels is more respectful of the great institution he attended.)

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)