The Supreme Court Decides that Corporations Are Persons on Basis of The 1st Amendment, Thus Verifying the Old Hack: "Money Talks"!

 

Blogger's Note: The People's E-Mail Network or "The Pen" sends e-mail announcements to it's list only rarely, when something of the greatest urgency should be brought to The People's attention.  The one that I reproduce below is one of the most important ever.  I urge you to read and think about it and then submit the easy-to-use Action Pages ...and perchance sign onto The Pen's list.

Five Supreme Court Judges Do Da Corporate Takeover Hustle, And They Must Be Stopped

The Pen

This the second in a series of action alerts about the fundamental

willful and pernicious errors underlying the decision by 5 agenda

driven right wing judges on the Supreme Court to gut all restraints

on corporate meddling in our elections. Each of these successive

alerts will analyze additional derelict aspects of this shameful and

truly dangerous decision, to further demonstrate why we the people

must speak out and act to reverse it.

In the first alert we made the triable case (which no attorney has

written us to dispute) that failing to even bother to distinguish

between domestic and foreign owned corporations, and knowingly

leaving America vulnerable to the latter BY their ruling, was de

facto an act of treason by The Supreme Court 5.

This alert will focus on the abandonment of every prudent rule of

judicial review, in favor of haste and the most extreme form of

judicial activism, again with specific page number references to the

opinion itself.

There are TWO critical action pages related to this, which we are

asking each of our participants to submit and also pass on to

everyone you know, which will send your message by fax to all your

own members of Congress, and President Obama too. You do not need your own fax machine to participate, the action pages do all this for you automatically in real time.

Action Page: Corporations Are NOT The People

http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1029.php

Action Page: Impeach The Supreme Court 5

http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1030.php

The most bedrock principle of appellate review is that first an

appellant must have PRESERVED the issue for appeal, by arguing and

getting a ruling on the point of law from the court below,

necessitating fact finding by the lower court to create a "record".

Innumerable appellants since the beginning of time have had the door

to review slammed in their face with the admonition that if they HAD

preserved the issue then and only then could a higher court review

it.

And in particular, appellate courts have traditionally been loathe to

making their own findings of fact (and only in a corrective way)

absent very clear error by the Court below, which is as it should be.

The role of a higher court is to apply the law to the facts, and make

rulings of what the LAW is, not make their own findings of fact. And

this is supremely true of the Supreme Court.

So even beyond the outrageousness of the result, it is at least

outrageous the way it was reached, and how that reach was justified.

As justification, The Supreme Court 5 asserted that some legal

emergency existed requiring a broader inquiry in this case,

resurrecting a claim already ABANDONED by the appellant in the court

below (opinion p. 12). Why directly overturning precedents at least

20 years old would suddenly be such an emergency they do not explain.

And when you actually read the opinion, the only pressure really on

the Supreme Court was because so-called Citizens United was bound to LOSE on the case they did preserve (opinion pp. 10-11). The Supreme Court 5 wanted that party to win. This was in itself an over the top act of judicial activism. But even beyond that they were hell bent on undoing as much as 100 years of campaign finance regulation (Stevens' dissent p. 3). Even the most conservative commentators agree this is what they have in fact done.

Appellate courts have been known on occasion to comment (in no

binding way) that if an appellant HAD made a particular argument they might have been receptive to it, a kind of higher court invitation

for someone to bring an actual case, an actual "controversy". And

then there would be a factual record in some subsequent case. But

here there was no controversy on the issue on which the ruling was

based, for it had already been WAIVED a priori, thereby denying the

Supreme Court any jurisdiction to rule on it (Consitution Article

III, Section 2, Clause 1).

But even further assuming that the Supreme Court was justified in

reopening a can of worms already discarded, the appropriate procedure would have been to return the case to the lower court with instructions, what is called a "remand", and which is done all the time after a ruling of LAW, for the court below to make findings of

fact and conduct further proceedings, so that there would be a

factual record for them to review, should the appellant wish to

appeal to the higher court again in the case of an unfavorable ruling

by the lower court.

All these prudent judicial things are exactly what the Supreme Court

5 did NOT do. Instead, they called for hurry up further briefing on

the new question of law THEY wanted to rule on (Stevens' dissent p.

4), in a vacuum of insufficient facts to make those arguments of law.

Instead, they set a scary new purported standard of review that says

they basically can make rulings on any point of law THEY want to

raise, whether developed in a lower court by an appellant or not.

This is truly frightening! It means that these five absolute

dictators in black robes have now asserted the unheard of prerogative

to make their own law pretty much any time they like, if only

tangentially related to appellant's actual arguments on appeal

(opinion pp. 13-14), a profoundly dangerous NEW standard, to become a new stare decisis if not immediately challenged and reversed by their removal from office. It means they now assert unchecked prerogative to make their own findings of fact whenever necessary to reach the result THEY want to reach.

And they must be stopped. The Supreme Court 5 must be impeached

before they go even further off the deep end. Whatever else within

the law that Congress can do to counteract this decision must be

done, and to make sure such a thing can never, ever happen again.

So please submit both action pages above now. The next alert in this

series will analyze the totally bogus basis of the so-called facts

the Supreme Court pulled out of sheer hot air in this case.

NEW FOUR COLOR BUMPER STICKERS

In the meantime we are making available for no charge (not even

shipping) your choice of one of two new bumper stickers. Take a

"Corporations Are NOT The People" bumper sticker, OR a "Impeach The Supreme Court 5" bumper sticker for free. Of course if you can make a contribution (or if you want both), please DO contribute what you can, which is what allows us to send these out for free to anyone who cannot make a donation right now.

We have engaged one of the top commercial printers in the country for printing these, they have gone to press using the highest quality 4 color process, the proofs are absolutely gorgeous, and we will be taking delivery shortly of the first run.

So you can still request your bumper sticker from the return page

after you submit either of the action pages above to get in on the

first shipping. Or you can do directly to this page and get them

there.

Bumper Stickers for no charge:

http://www.peaceteam.net/bumper_stickers.php

Facebook participants can also submit the action pages at

Corporations Are Not The People:

http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1029

Impeach The Supreme Court 5:

http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1030