High Court To Take Up Pressing Issues This Week

By Linda Greenhouse - February 27th, 2006 - The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 — The most pressing and unsettled questions in election law are those that concern the role of money, the role of race and the role of partisanship. The Supreme Court this week will take up all three.

Hearing arguments in a campaign finance case from Vermont on Tuesday and a congressional redistricting case from Texas on Wednesday, the justices will venture onto a shifting landscape where the controlling legal precedents are either unclear or unstable and the prospect for fundamental change looms on the horizon.

On many of the issues, the new Roberts Court will almost certainly be as closely divided as was the Rehnquist Court. Two years ago, for example, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who was succeeded last month by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., cast the decisive fifth vote to uphold major provisions of a new federal campaign finance law. The justices were unable during that same term to agree on a majority opinion in a case from Pennsylvania on whether the Constitution prohibits a partisan gerrymander.

What a farce. The Supreme Court of the United States has expressed sympathy with the premise that the right of a candidate to SPEND MONEY is an issue of FREE SPEECH but the right of a citizen to DONATE MONEY is not a right of FREE SPEECH but instead AN ACT OF CORRUPTION that must be prohibited.

Democracy is becoming more corrupt because of the idiocy promulgated by stupid court rulings. Every single time the courts try to reduce corruption, they increase it. They then propose another ignorant ruling to fix their previous stupidity. Butting out and letting competition decide races seems completely beyond their intelligence. They keep trying to make the campaigns fair to the candidates they think should win, by carefully balacing the scales of monetary justice they see as critical to fair elections. The hair splitting hypocrisy of this cannot be over emphasized.