According to an AP article, “The Supreme Court appears poised to wipe away limits on campaign spending by corporations and labor unions in time for next year’s congressional elections in a case that began as a dispute over a movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Now, for years I have argued that the whole regime of campaign finance regulation is a patently unconstitutional elite assault on the sovereignty of the American people. It masquerades as a populist effort to control the electoral influence of money. In fact, it aims to give big money unchallenged sway over the choices effectively available to the electorate during general elections.
Given the direction of current events, it appears that many Americans are fully awakening to the elitists’ strategy for manipulating the outcome of U.S. elections. The awakening began several years ago when concern over border security led many to speak out against the elite betrayal of American sovereignty. They realized that a coalition of elitists from both “major” political parties had quietly surrendered control of U.S. borders. It was (and still is) poised to pass legislation that will turn the resulting tide of illegal immigration into a force that achieves the demographic subversion of the American electorate. Now people who supposedly are its representatives are rudely dismissing the electorate’s legitimate concerns over the Obama faction’s proposed government takeover of the U.S. health system. Thanks to their arrogance, many voters are awakening to the realization that these elected officials no longer speak as representatives, but as rulers. They no longer see themselves working for the people who elected them.
Upset by this arrogance, a growing number of voters have realized that they must find some way to reassert their control, or else government of by and for the people will be lost for good. A “throw da bums out” mentality is beginning to take hold. Is it strong enough to defy the sophisticated structures of manipulation now in place? Will there be alternative candidates available in the 2010 elections really loyal to the American people? Will there be any who are sincerely dedicated to restoring constitutional limits on government power, limits meant to recognize and secure the sovereignty of the people?
Such real alternatives would be more likely if laws that restrict the people’s freedom of political speech and association were widely recognized for what they are – unconstitutional assaults against the public liberty, assaults that consolidate elitist control of the political process. Thanks to these unconstitutional measures, individual citizens cannot freely express their views in the critical weeks preceding an election. They cannot use their associations and organizations to publicize those views by the most effective means. They cannot freely and to the extent they choose, associate their money with the candidates and causes that represent those views.
So liberty will benefit from a Supreme Court decision that frees corporations and unions from these restrictions, right? Wrong! The whole point of the phony campaign finance “reforms” was to assure that big corporations and big labor (which are now the counterpoints of the same big government political agenda) would control the alternatives available in an increasingly phony offering of political choices. All along the real aim of the phony “reforms” has been to hobble the potential effect of individual contributors.
Individuals who are not slaves to the colluding imperatives of big business, big labor and big government pose the greatest danger to the elitist subversion of self-government. If people of modest individual wealth can freely combine their capital to any degree they wish, they have at least a chance to push a candidate past the threshold of viability in any given election. In this respect, political potential may be like a chemical reaction. The more politically inert, candidates favored by the elitists have a harder time generating a reaction among the voters. Their candidacies only succeed given a huge infusion of resources and a manipulative structure that inhibits more intrinsically appealing candidates from fair consideration. Given a fair opportunity, candidates more truly representative of the voters’ heartfelt convictions more easily produce a positive voter reaction. The critical mass of money resources needed to make them viable is therefore proportionately smaller.
As we approach the 2010 elections it will be transparently ironic if a Supreme Court decision frees the big corporations and labor unions from spending limits and constraints, while leaving individuals to labor under unconstitutional political disabilities. The irony intensifies when we remember the original rationale for the Bill of Rights. The American people laid claim to sovereignty based on the principles of justice articulated in the Declaration of Independence. According to those principles, individuals are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Bill of Rights was intended to secure the freedoms logically connected with those rights, most especially in the political realm.
Do big corporations and big unions have unalienable rights? They are legal persons, deriving their existence from human positive law and having no rights except those derived from it. Unalienable rights are, by contrast, facts of nature reflecting the will of the Creator God. The individuals enjoying those rights are not figments of human positive law but natural persons, whose rights derive from an authority that transcends humanity and is antecedent to all merely human positive law.
A Supreme Court decision that purports to recognize the rights of the legal figments while leaving under fatal assault the rights of the natural persons will truly stand American political justice on its head. It will be in the electoral realm the practical counterpart of recent court decisions that protect the fictional right to homosexual marriage while destroying the just prerogatives of the natural family. And it will come just in time to make sure that the elitist forces that dominate the existing so-called two-party system have free rein to gather and spend the huge resources they will surely need to thwart the sovereignty of the people one last time.
That’s irony to be sure, but only a fool would believe it is just a coincidence.
Servile Biden-puffing ‘journalists’ loyal to the end
Tim Graham