How SCOTUS killed Democracy.

America is losing its democracy to the overwhelming power of big money, and the blame rests almost entirely on the Supreme Court.

The idea of corporate entities spending unlimited amounts of money is predicated on two judicial principles; free speech rights and corporate personhood. The idea of corporations as people (a phrase made infamous made by Mitt Romney in 2012) actually goes back all the way to an 1886 court case, and a massive mix up by a court reporter. In the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. The case was a matter of corporate law concerning taxation. The mix up came when a court reporter wrote that the Supreme Court had written in their decision that corporations were protected under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court never wrote an official judicial opinion on the matter, but future Supreme Courts upheld the right solely based on the write up by the court reporter.

This idea of corporate money as constitutionally protected speech was circulated in 1971 in a now infamous correspondence known as the Powell memo. Future Associate Justice Lewis Powell wrote to a legal friend that he hoped to use his power on the Supreme Court to consolidate corporate power and target leftists he saw as a threat to the county’s economic system. Powell was put on the court less than a year later and in 1976 in the case Buckley vs Valeo, corporations were given free speech rights, with the argument that money equals speech, an idea the Supreme Court of the 1970s argued was central to the…