RSSSupreme Court Hands Obama Another Defeat
Carl Andrews | January 21, 2010
As if the victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate special election wasn’t bad enough mews for the Obama administration, now the United States Supreme Court has just handed down some more bad news for the President.
Corporations can spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a landmark decision that allows massive sums to be spent to influence future elections.
The 5-4 ruling split the high court along conservative and liberal lines. It was a defeat for the Obama administration and supporters of campaign finance laws who said that ending the limits would unleash a flood of corporate money into the political system.
The ruling will transform the political landscape and the rules on how money can be spent in this year’s congressional election and the 2012 presidential contest.
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the limits violated constitutional free-speech rights.
“We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers,” he wrote.
In his sharply worded dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”
The justices overturned Supreme Court precedents from 2003 and 1990 that upheld federal and state limits on independent expenditures by corporate treasuries to support or oppose candidates.
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