The Supreme Court: Business’s best friend?

If you run a major corporation or want to use your great wealth to buy elections, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com, the U.S. Supreme Court has just finished off “a spectacularly great term.” Under Chief Justice John Roberts, a former corporate attorney, the “radical conservative majority” of this court spent the past year slamming the courthouse door on women, minorities, and any American seeking a level playing ground. By a 5-4 vote, the court dismissed a class-action lawsuit from Wal-Mart’s underpaid female employees, said The New York Times in an editorial. It overturned an Arizona law awarding public matching funds to political candidates facing a wealthy opponent, and ruled that investors couldn’t sue a mutual fund that cheated them. This consistent pattern of siding with money and power, by a court whose Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas openly ally themselves with right-wing groups, has badly “weakened the court’s reputation for being independent and impartial.”

This court is actually not that ideological, said Jonathan Adler in NationalReview.com. Only 20 percent of its rulings this term were by 5-4 votes, which is actually below average for the past decade. If it has a bias, it’s in favor of free speech. Arizona’s campaign-finance law, for example, attempted to discourage wealthy individuals from buying political ads by holding over them the threat of publicly funded reprisal ads. The court struck down that law for precisely the same reason that it also ruled to allow the selling of violent video games to children, and to let the abominable Westboro Baptist Church hold profane protests at military funerals. “Free speech isn’t always pretty,” said the New York Post, but our nation is founded on its protection. “It’s a blessing to have a Supreme Court so invested in protecting America’s bedrock right.”

It isn’t free speech the court’s conservative justices want to protect, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. It’s “paid speech.” Arizona’s campaign-finance law didn’t silence wealthy individuals who want buy political ads—it let their less-well-funded opponents respond, thereby creating more political speech. But the court’s conservative bloc “bristles at nearly every effort to give the less wealthy and less powerful an opportunity to prevail.” What happens to democracy when the nation’s highest court dedicates itself to defending the right of corporations and the rich to do as they please? “That’s the unfortunate experiment on which we are now embarked.”

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