A partisan Supreme Court (Rutten | LAT)

[struggle4progress]

The decision on campaign finance points to something more troubling than unlimited corporate contributions.
By Tim Rutten
January 23, 2010

... We're all familiar, of course, with the disenfranchisement of corporate America. It's common knowledge that the interests of big business are routinely ignored at every level of society, and that the deprivation of rights suffered by those unfortunates who populate its executive suites is a continuing affront to the national conscience. That, at least, was the suggestion of the strident tone taken by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. "If the 1st Amendment has any force," he wrote, "it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or associations of citizens for simply engaging in political speech" ...

... The predictable effect on parties is particularly odd from this court, given that one of the most distressing things about this decision -- considered in a sequence stretching back to Bush vs. Gore -- is that it demonstrates that this is a partisan court, willing to hand down sweeping decisions that ignore decades of jurisprudence based on five Republican votes.

That was not true of the activist court over which Chief Justice Earl Warren presided. At the time he was sworn in, Warren was the only member of the court appointed by a Republican president. Still, he inherited a group of justices deeply split over the overriding question of the day -- segregation -- and fashioned a unanimous rejection of legalized racial separation in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. As The Times' Jim Newton -- Warren's biographer (and also my editor) -- has pointed out, "Before Fred Vinson, Warren's predecessor, died, the court was deeply split over Brown. At least three justices (Tom Clark, Stanley Reed and Vinson) were inclined to uphold Plessy vs. Ferguson in defense of segregation, and two others (Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson) were stymied by the question of how to overturn such a long-standing precedent. Vinson's death, which Frankfurter referred to as his first solid evidence of the existence of God, cleared the way for that impasse to be broken. Thus Warren achieved a unanimity that elevated the opinion above partisan or sectional politics." Can that be said of any major decision handed down by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s court? ...

Our current ability to predict Supreme Court decisions by weighing the issues against the two parties' programs is worse than melancholy. It marks a new low in our nation's descent into corrosive partisanship.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten23-2010jan23,0,3800098.column