Reexamine Citizens United: Possibilty That Court Will Fail to Stop Money’s Increasing Role in Politics | Democracy, elections, and voting at DC

As usual Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog has the latest news on the campaign finance cases working their way to the Supreme Court ruling in a few weeks.  The decision, which can take many forms, is going to shape the debate about money’s role in American elections for the next period.  Will the Supreme Court double down on its support for unlimited and secretive donations to politicians or will they rise up and take the opportunity to reform a terribly corrupt system that brought the US years of mismanagement.  According to an article, from the Billings Gazette, a Montana newspaper, there is increasing likelyhood of the Court choosing the path of corruption:

A federal judge Friday indicated he may strike down a long-standing Montana campaign law that bans political parties from spending money on or endorsing nonpartisan judicial candidates. But U.S. District Judge Charles Lovell of Helena declined to suspend the law before Montana’s primary election next Tuesday, saying the issue needs a wider hearing before taking such action.

“I think this is a very serious issue and the plaintiffs have a sound and authoritative basis for their position,” Lovell said. “But I do agree that further hearings are going to be required.”

The San Francisco Chronicle had an very interesting piece about the total collapse of the corruption stopping campaign finance laws.  There exist today almost no laws that seriously prohibit money’s ability to buy political power.  The article is a great analysis piece on the unprecedented corruption of our time:

All told, the immense amount of money in American campaigns, the cozy relationships between candidates and their financial backers — and now, too, a seeming lack of accountability for alleged rule-breakers — is fueling the public’s long-standing distrust of its politicians and doubts about the credibility of the system. “There’s not much for voters to have faith in,” says Trevor Potter, a former Federal Election Commission member and a proponent of campaign-finance reform. “We don’t have much of a campaign-finance system at this stage, and we are wide open to the possibilities of corruption.”