Some people believe that Tuesday’s Republican victory in Massachusetts, which may have cut the throat of health care reform, was big news. I beg to differ. The big news came out of a large room holding nine small people and a few witnesses on Thursday afternoon. It was doomsday for the individual in American politics. The Supreme Court decided on Thursday that corporations and unions are no longer beholden to the rules that had limited their spending on federal elections. Remember that date. Because the gargantuan coffers of those corporations and unions are now open very, very wide, and the words “shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech” have led to some very murky consequences. Justice John Paul Stevens read a long, lonely dissent from the bench. He called the decision “a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have ... fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the time of Theodore Roosevelt.”
That’s right. Those protections had been around since 1907, when Standard Oil was the biggest thing going. Things are a little different now. We have TV, the Internet, cars and multinational corporations whose budget rolls make Standard Oil look like Stan’s Stop-N-Gas.
Sean Hannity will crow. It’s his job. As will other aligned media outlets: It seems like the Right won, after all. But I honestly believe that it will be tough for the most silver-tongued of radiomen or slickest periodical to make too many Americans read today’s paper and not be angry.
Liberal or conservative, it doesn’t matter much. This is about something else. This about some serious paradigmatic whiplash for anyone who thought they knew how politics is dealt, bought and sold in America. Some commentators gleefully declared that the Supreme Court Republicans overplayed their hands, noting that Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the people at Google — a pretty rich, pretty liberal set of dudes — are also players now. And ah, how the ol’ tug-of-war goes on. But it doesn’t, necessarily. There’s a new game afoot, and whatever it is, it sure won’t look much like the old tug-of-war.
No, this isn’t about politics. It’s about a strange feeling that citizens with human eyes, ears, brains and souls suddenly have a little less say in human affairs.
