No Tea Bagger protests against the courts latest Big Government encroachment?...
By Brad Friedman on 6/10/2010, 1:58pm PT  

If you still have any doubts about what this Supreme Court is up to, even after their disastrous Citizens United ruling, yesterday's "emergency order" should now make things crystal clear...

In a burst of judicial activism, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upended the gubernatorial race in Arizona, cutting off matching funds to candidates participating in the state's public campaign finance system. Suddenly, three candidates, including Gov. Jan Brewer, can no longer receive public funds they had counted on to run against a free-spending wealthy opponent.

The court's reckless order muscling into the race was terse and did not say whether there were any dissents, though it is hard to imagine there were not. An opinion explaining its reasoning will have to wait until the next term, assuming it takes the case, but by that time the state's general election will be over and its model campaign finance system substantially demolished.

It seems likely that the Roberts court will use this case to continue its destruction of the laws and systems set up in recent decades to reduce the influence of big money in politics. By the time it is finished, millionaires and corporations will have regained an enormous voice in American politics, at the expense of candidates who have to raise money the old-fashioned way and, ultimately, at the expense of voters.

"Regained," New York Times? Did we miss something? Had the "millionaires and corporations" previously lost their "enormous voice in American Politics"???

Maddow covered some of the details in quickie coverage last night, observing: "It's great news for anyone psyched to get all the riff-raff out of politics so we can get over this whole democracy fantasy and just settle down to being ruled by our economic overlords, like the founding fathers intended."...


The court's unsigned, one-paragraph, emergency order is here [PDF]. Muriel Kane at RAW STORY has more.

Whenever we speak with folks in Arizona, the one thing they seem to be unanimously proud of, in regard to their dubious electoral system, is their Clean Elections law which has allowed a lot of candidates who might not otherwise have the funds or insider connnections to not only get into the game, but actually get elected.

That may now be all over, thanks to this wildly activist U.S. Supreme Court who continues to show that they are not conservative in the least, at least in regard to their propensity for Big Government over-reaching into state rights issues.

Where are the Tea Bagger protests now? Where is Glenn Beck and his phony outrage? Yeah, that's what we thought --- nowhere.

(P.S. Another big thanks to John Kerry for all of this too!)

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