RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events McCain to Supreme Court: Corporations are NOT people

Sen. John McCain used a TV appearance Friday to take out after the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 Citizens United ruling, which removed all limits from campaign spending. McCain criticized a $10 million donation to Mitt Romney’s “SuperPAC.”

Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who owns a huge casino in Macau, has just put $10 million into Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney group that spent $41 million during the Republican primary season.

Since the lion’s share of Adelson’s profits come from Macau, a former Portuguese colony now part of China, it raises “in a round-about way” the prospect that foreign “money is coming into an American campaign, political campaigns,” McCain said on PBS’ “News Hour.”

Pressed by host Judy Woodruff, McCain expanded his critique to include Citizens United, which negated laws designed to curb corporate corruption of politics dating back to 1907 and the administration of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. He said:

“Yes, that is a great deal of money (Adelson’s contribution). And, again, we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization that Teddy Roosevelt had that we have a limit on the flow of money and that corporations are not people.”

“That’s why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens and so to say that corporations are people, again, flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that we have made — that have been made in the past.”

With its 5-4 ruling in Citizens United, the Supreme Court said that corporations (and unions, and trade associations) should be treated as people and not singled out for limits in the amount of money they can spend.

McCain has endorsed and campaigned with Romney. But in an Iowa State Fair appearance last August, the Republicans’ nominee-in-waiting said: “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Citizens United has opened the floodgates to record spending, the largest chunk of it from wealthy conservatives.

The billionaire Koch Brothers, at a conference in San Diego next weekend, hope to put together a $395 million war chest to support Republican candidates and conservative causes, according to Politico.

In one state — Ohio — conservative political groups, shielded from disclosure of contributors by non-profit “charitable” status — have already spent $8 million in ads attacking Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

McCain and then-Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, tried to step the flow a decade ago with the McCain-Feinegold, but have seen its limitations wash away in the flood of cash.

A colleague of McCain’s, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, defended Citizens United in a Friday speech to the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington, D.C., and called on the Obama administration to cease what he called efforts to intimidate the Koch brothers and other wealthy Republican donors.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2012/06/15/mccain-to-supremes-corporations-are-not-people/