John McCain Says He’s Glad a 5-4 Supreme Court Majority Fabricated a Constitutional Ground to Strike Down Most of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law as Unconstitutional
And to think that earlier today I was still worried that the Dems won’t retake control of the Senate.
I think you should still be.
I am. But I do think that running ads with a clip of McCain saying that could maybe get some millennials who weren’t planning to vote to trouble themselves to do so.
Hope you’re right.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment or the assessment, but where in the Yahoo News article does it say that McCain suggested that the Supreme Court decision was based on fabricated Constitutional grounds. It’s a wonderful idea and I’ve often wondered why Scalia, Thomas et al were never sufficiently criticized in print for their often specious interpretations of the Constitution. For example, “A well regulated Militia*, being necessary to the security of a free State**, the right of the people*** to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
* This phrase doesn’t count. It comes first in the statement structure, but the framers didn’t really mean what it clearly states.
** Note that the framers were here concerned about the security of the state, not the safety of the individual in day to day life.
*** Note the use of the plural, the people. Not the group singular, people,
as in all individuals.
Where in the Yahoo News article does it say that McCain suggested that the Supreme Court decision was based on fabricated Constitutional grounds? Nowhere.
But since McCain was a primary author and sponsor of the law, and aggressively fought for its enactment, it seems a safe bet that he thinks that the law was constitutional and that the constitutional grounds for striking it down consisted of formerly unknown constitutional grounds fabricated via a process of alchemy.
And he is, I’ll just say, not alone in that belief.
Beverly,
I’m not disagreeing with your basic premiss, but putting your words into McCain’s mouth in your title gives a false expectation to the reader that good old John has gained some level of honesty in his approach, over the last decade, to political analysis to an issue. It has often amused me to read of some conservative’s bemoaning a liberal court’s decision as judicial activism while totally supporting a conservative court’s outright distortion of various aspects of the Constitution. Scalia, Thomas et al could not even hide their personal political agendas while formulating Court decisions. They were the very definition of judicial activism, “philosophy of judicial decision-making whereby judges allow their personal views about public policy, among other factors, to guide their decisions.”
My post’s title is intended as satirical, to drive home the point that McCain wants to obstruct Clinton Supreme Court appointments that would overturn Citizens United, which struck down the McCain-Feingold law as unconstitutional.
It absolutely drives me crazy that this point, about Supreme Court appointments and Citizens United–one of the most broadly unpopular Supreme Court decisions in modern history, that goes to the very heart of what so many people know is the prime reason for the gross imbalance of real power in government, has not been a campaign point for Clinton OR for Senate candidates.
There’s something incredibly retro about the entire way that both Clinton AND the down-ballot Dems have been campaigning–to the extent that they’s been campaigning at all. I read a few days that–incredibly–the some ridiculously large percentage of voters in Florida have either never heard of the Dem Senate candidate, Patrick Murphy, or don’t know anything about him.
This close to an election in which the incumbent Repub is or at least should be quite vulnerable, nearly half of the voters in that poll don’t know who the Dem candidate is or don’t know anything about him.
That’s just crazy.
Stevens important dissent thoughtfully analyzes the reasons that the particular speech from the particular speakers that was limited under McCain-Feingold might well have bad effects. But if the first challenge for the dissent was to establish that McCain-Feingold did not abridge the freedom of speech he failed. The dissent was about why abridging the freedom of speech in this case under that law was wise. You do not need to be a die-hard textualist to notice that the first amendment does not make an exception for unwise free speech, particularly when it is specifically political speech.