Litigation

LWV President: ?Buck Up, Mr. Chief Justice!?

By Peter Hardin

Mary G. Wilson, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, would like Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to know that “a little honest feedback can be a good thing.”

Wilson wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post about Justice Roberts’ recently expressed doubts on Supreme Court justices attending the annual State of the Union address. He wasn’t happy about President Obama’s directly criticizing the court’s Citizens United decision, Wilson asserted.

But honest feedback can be positive, particularly in a case like this where Citizens United “clearly revealed that the majority on the court has an astonishingly naive view of how corruption works in our nation’s capital,” Wilson wrote. She added:

“Everyone else in the room understood that allowing huge sums of unregulated cash into our elections will undermine the role of individual voters and further expose our elected officials to the siren calls of corporate lobbyists.

“Buck up, Mr. Chief Justice. Occasionally there are some things you really need to hear.”

The League of Women Voters is a partner of Justice at Stake, and it submitted an amicus brief in the landmark campaign finance case.

Justice Roberts’ recent criticism of the scene at the State of the Union speech, and a response by the White House that renewed its criticism of Citizens United, (see Gavel Grab) continued to spur other activists and commentators to take sides.

“The battle will be won or lost in the court of public opinion,” Jeffrey Rosen wrote in the Washington Post. Jeff Shesol wrote a commentary in the New York Times headlined, “Justices Will Prevail.” In Huffington Post, the title of a piece by Glenn Greenwald was “The majestic petulance of John Roberts.” In the same publication, Dahlia Lithwick wrote, “Et Tu, SOTU? John Roberts’ nonpartisan attack on presidential partisanship.”

Earlier Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice at Stake, had suggested in Gavel Grab that nationally televised criticism from the State of the Union address could unleash a politically motivated backlash.

Meanwhile, senior officials from the Obama administration defended on Sunday TV talk shows the president’s delivering criticism of the court at the January speech, according to a report by Fox News.

Obama adviser David Axelrod cautioned that the decision could result in “a corporate takeover of our elections,” a Washington Post article reported. Steps to mitigate the ruling will be a focus of the president’s during the next two months, the article said. The decision lifted restrictions on corporate political spending to support or oppose candidates in elections.

States were widely considering bills to respond to the Supreme Court decision. In West Virginia, the House passed but the Senate defeated a bill to require a corporation’s board of directors to seek shareholder approval before making political expenditures, according to WVNS TV.

In Maryland, the kinds of restraints that states can enact were outlined in a Washington Post commentary by state Sens. Brian Frosh and Jamie Raskin. You can learn more about Citizens United from Justice at Stake’s fact sheet about it, or news release discussing it.

Full post as published by The Gavel on March 15, 2010 (boomark / email).