Supreme Court Eviscerates Campaign Finance Reform

Basically, the Supreme Court just said that corporations can run any sort of ad that they want:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate campaign spending, reversing two of its precedents and freeing companies to conduct advertising campaigns that explicitly try to sway voters.

The 5-4 majority, invoking the Constitution’s free-speech clause, said the government lacks a legitimate basis to restrict independent campaign expenditures by companies. The ruling went well beyond the circumstances in the case before the justices, a dispute over a documentary film attacking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

They have just deliberately created a "Wild West" for campaign finance, and they did it because they bought into the myth of Obama small donors (he out-raised from Wall Street fat cats against both Clinton and McCain).

About the only bright spot on this is that Sotomayor has given indications that she opposes she is dubious of the according of "person" status to corporations, which was done by a court clerk in the footnotes (no, I am not joking) in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. (see Sotomayor's comments here)

There is a decent chance that Obama will get another opportunity to appoint another Supreme Court justice before 2012, and it's very important to counterbalance the nut-jobs that Bush put in.