The Cowardly Supreme Court

I wrote a long blog post about the Supreme Court but it was somehow lost, and I’m not going to rewrite it. So here’s a shorter version.

The Founding Fathers distrusted power – they believed, with Lord Acton, that power corrupts. The whole Bill of Rights (Amendments 1 – 10 for those who have forgotten their civics lessons) was intended to protect individuals against power, especially the power of the State and the majority.

In particular, the First Amendment guarantee of free speech was designed to give people the right to voice their opinions without fear of prosecution or imprisonment. However, over the years, activist Supreme Court justices have reinterpreted the First Amendment to mean the right of Power to speak freely through the purchase of media time.

A constitutional amendment that once guaranteed the right of the individual to say or write things critical of the powerful, has now been transformed by the Supreme Court, by refusing to set limits to the influence of money in political campaigning, into a guarantee of  the right of the powerful to buy political influence.

Thus it has been throughout history: the cowardly are always deferential to Power.