Posted by olvlzl.
Gassing on for his ususal 60 Minutes slot tonight, Andy Rooney asked why it costs so much to run for president. He seemed to pretend that it’s some kind of mystery but there’s no guess work involved. It’s the Supreme Court saying that money is speech in Buckley v. Valeo, and similar kinds of rulings that thwart any attempts to take back public office for The People. The Supreme Court doesn’t see their job as promoting or even protecting democracy and The Peoples right to govern themselves. They pretend that their job is to protect the process even if that process results in a corrupt, anti-democratic oligarchy flooding the airwaves, lying to The People, installing puppets and setting up the most corrupt governments in the history of the country. That’s not a secret.
There is no law of nature that says that the rules we’ve had imposed on us are the only ones we have any reason to hope for. Election law isn’t physics. Since the Congress and a number of State legislatures have passed many campaign finance laws and the appropriate executives signed them only to have them thrown out by the courts, it is the judges who are the weakest link in the long fight to take the government back for The People. Maybe the best hope to change that is by pressuring the Senate Judiciary Committee, they’re elected, they can’t entirely ignore The People even if they’re lawyers who have bought even the most anti-democratic rulings of the courts. The courts have to be forced to take the damage they do to democracy into account. Democracy isn’t a footnote, it’s the most basic ground rule, the ONLY thing that gives the entire process of government any legitimacy. Without democracy they’ve got no more right to make rulings than the bosses of crime syndicates agreeing to carve up their territories among themselves.
If you’re not going to answer the question, Andy, why raise it?