SCOTUS

The Supreme Court has agreed to take a case that justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer say will give it a chance to rethink its infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision. The court is being asked to look into a Montana Supreme Court decision stating that its law restricting corporate election spending in state elections is fine, because it "arises from Montana history," UPI reports. Essentially, Montana is arguing that Citizens United only applies to federal laws and elections, not state ones.

Eight in 10 Americans believe that there is too much money in American politics, andonly 17 percent agree with the Supreme Court that corporations should be allowed to spend unlimited money to try to influence elections.

Nothing about the Supreme Court – not its magnificent building atop Capitol Hill nor its very title – suggests that its word is anything other than final. Yet federal appellate judges and even state court judges sometimes find ways to insist on an outcome the Supreme Court has rejected.

The Supreme Court looms over our political landscape like a giant, immovable object. Americans have traditionally respected the court’s purview, believing that it serves justice, dispassionately. Yet the most controversial decision of the last twenty five years — Bush v. Gore — has profoundly shaken that sentiment. And other decisions, like the Citizens United ruling that prevented restrictions on corporation and labor outside expenditures in elections, are inviting further skepticism. Just who does the Court serve? Is this another case of Platinum Citizens getting one set of rules, and everyone else getting another set of rules? And is the Court dominated, like the rest of our government, by money? Do we have a bought Supreme Court?

It is “do-as-I-say, not what-I-do” time at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a majority opinion in a 2009 case involving the conflict of interest of a state Supreme Court justice in West Virginia, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:

In an interview with Meet the Press’ David Gregory this morning, GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain endorsed Justice Clarence Thomas as a model a President Cain would follow in making appointments to the Supreme Court: