"Few of the 100 or so residents, though, think much of his art. In America, 'you don’t need to be very good at something..."

"'You just need to be different. You don’t need to sing or paint well so long as you do it differently.' She much prefers Rembrandt because ;at least you can see he put a lot of work into his paintings.'"

"She" is Julia Varcholova, a resident of Mikova, Slovakia. She's talking about Andy Warhol, her cousin, and quoted in "Andy Warhol Said He Came From 'Nowhere.' This Is It" (NYT).

I wish I had tags for "What nonelite people think about elite things" and "What nonAmericans think about Americans." Especially the latter. The former is a trite subject that would include every "My child could paint better than that." But I'm intrigued by ideas that foreigners have about my people, especially when they're not particularly mean but actually say something about how we seem different. Here it's the idea that individuality reigns in America and we love originality. You don't even need to be good. Just creative. Not completely true, but interesting to know that's our brand.

Glenn Loury and I resist the resistance to Trump.

In this hot new episode of Bloggingheads (recorded on Friday), Glenn Loury objects strenuously to the effort to treat Trump as abnormal, and I agree. Despite that basic agreement, we find a lot to talk about:



The tags indicate the range of subject matter. The topics listed at the BHTV website are:

The “normalizing Trump” debate
Trump’s desire to keep judges “in check”
Political posturing around Gorsuch and Garland
Should judges infer that Trump wants a Muslim ban?
Glenn defends the Shelby County ruling on voting rights
Ann defends Citizen’s United

Where do Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump want to see the Supreme Court "take the country"?

At last night's debate, the moderator, Chris Wallace, chose to make the first question about the Supreme Court. This perked me up. It's what I've concentrated my attention on for the past 35 years, and we've got an open seat and maybe 2 or even 4 seats that may open up in the next presidential term. What I remember from watching the debate last night is that both candidates were absolutely awful. Now that I've slept on it and have access to the transcript, I want to double-check my own opinion. So come along with me and judge for yourself.

Wallace observed that the topic of the Supreme Court had yet to be discussed at a debate in any depth, and he wanted to "drill down." Going to Clinton first, Wallace said:

[W]here do you want to see the court take the country? 

The idea that the Court is in the lead taking us somewhere is all wrong, but no one is going to point that out.

And secondly, what’s your view on how the constitution should be interpreted? Do the founders' words mean what they say or is it a living document to be applied flexibly, according to changing circumstances? 

That's a simple way to prompt the candidates to talk about interpretive methodology, and it's an invitation to bungle, because candidates don't really want to get stuck at either end of those seemingly opposite positions. (I say "seemingly," because you can say that the founder's words meant that this is a living document to be applied flexibly, according to changing circumstances.)

Clinton goes first:

You know, I think when we talk about the Supreme Court, it really raises the central issue in this election. Namely, what kind of country are we going to be? What kind of opportunities will we provide for our citizens? What kind of rights will Americans have? And I feel strongly that the Supreme Court needs to stand on the side of the American people. Not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy. 

I was already loudly arguing with her. The side? The Supreme Court isn't supposed to take sides. She's blatantly saying she wants a Court that doesn't act like a court but gets on one side. Her Court is a Court that ought to have to recuse itself constantly.

"While [Michael] Moore may be more open about the electioneering involved in Michael Moore in Trumpland and the making of the movie..."

"... it's nothing new for the politically-minded director, whose films often have an unapologetic political agenda to them. What's new is that Citizens United allows Moore to be honest about it. The film that sparked that landmark First Amendment ruling, Hillary: The Movie, was inspired by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, released in the summer of 2004, and the influence that film had on the election season.... The Federal Elections Commission decided... that the two films were different because the latter was 'electioneering.' In [Citizens United], the Supreme Court took away the power from government to make those kind of highly subjective distinctions, freeing Michael Moore to be honest about his intents...."

Writes Ed Krayewski at Reason.com.

The Intercept catches up with Justice Kennedy and extract an utterly standard routine statement of refusal to comment on cases.

It's what the Justices always do, but The Intercept runs it with the headline: "Justice Kennedy, Author of Citizens United, Shrugs Off Question About His Deeply Flawed Premise."

The author, Lee Fang, makes himself the hero of the story:

I caught up with Kennedy during a reception at the Justice Anthony M. Kennedy Library and Learning Center in the Robert Matsui Courthouse hosted by the Federal Bar Association Sacramento Chapter last Friday. Kennedy, after listening to my question about the false crux of his decision, waved his hand and shrugged off the issue, calling it something for others, “the bar and the lower bench to figure out”...

The full quote from Kennedy — after he listens to Fang's presentation — was "Well, I don’t comment. That’s for the bar and the lower bench to figure out." 

Shouldn't Republicans love it that "Donald Trump, With Bare-Bones Campaign, Relies on G.O.P. for Vital Tasks"?

The quote is a headline at the NYT, which seems to want to nudge us to think that Donald Trump is doing it wrong.

But don't Republicans pine for small government and don't we all like efficient government?

Why is the big-spending Clinton campaign with its gigantic staff held up as the standard compared to which Donald Trump falls short?

You could answer that it's wrong to compare the style of a campaign to the style by which the candidate would govern. And yet we're continually pushed to infer that Donald Trump, as President, will speak the same way and display the same demeanor we see at rallies. But perhaps that's because the speech and demeanor strike people as inappropriate for a State of the Union address or a face-to-face meeting with a foreign leader. It works as anti-Trump, so the media like that argument, and they don't like the argument that he's running an innovative, efficient campaign. It's the same reason the media don't stress Hillary Clinton's extreme resistance to press conferences and frame that as a terrible characteristic for a President.

The media feel like lawyers for the Clinton campaign, taking whatever the evidence is and presenting it as advantageous to their client.

From the above-linked article:

Mr. Trump spends little on polling and made his first advertising purchase of the general election campaign only last week. His rapidly growing digital fund-raising and voter-targeting operation is a partnership with the Republican National Committee, relying significantly on lists built and maintained in recent years by the party....

Although he has opened offices in Ohio and Florida in recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s field efforts rely primarily on roughly 500 Republican National Committee organizers scattered across 11 swing states.

The arrangement is a kind of throwback to the pre-Citizens United era, when party organizations — not independent “super PACs” and political nonprofits — assumed many of the financial and organizational burdens of national campaigns....

Clinton is the one running on the argument that Citizens United is a horrific Supreme Court case that must be overruled because it's wrecking the way we do politics, but ironically she's the one doing politics that way and Trump — despite the freedom of the outside groups to spend money on his behalf — is running his operation on his own and relying the resources of the party whose nomination he worked hard to win.

But, we're told, Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers don't want to help him. And some GOP insiders are trying to figure out how to deprive Trump of the resources of the GOP.

The difficulty, though, is that as November approaches, the Republican National Committee is more reliant on Mr. Trump for cash than on other recent nominees. Millions of dollars are coming in through a small-donor-focused committee operated jointly with the committee, which is splitting a share of the proceeds with Mr. Trump. Over half the money raised by the Trump campaign and the committee combined in July came from donors giving less than $200, far more than for any recent Republican nominee....

I would think that sounds great, and yet — to the NYT — it's a "difficulty."

If Donald Trump showed equivalent disrespect for the rule of law, he would be lambasted, but Bernie Sanders can say...

"Hillary Clinton will nominate justices to the Supreme Court who are prepared to overturn Citizens United and end the movement toward oligarchy in this country. Her Supreme Court appointments will also defend a woman’s right to choose, workers’ rights, the rights of the LGBT community, the needs of minorities and immigrants and the government’s ability to protect the environment."

And you don't hear a peep.

And I don't mean "peep" in the sense of "My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist."

And if you don't understand what I'm referring to by the shorthand in the post title, let me remind you of the way every Supreme Court nominee since the Bork debacle has presented himself or herself in the confirmation hearings — notably Justice Ginsburg:

At her Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly explained that the judicial obligation of impartiality required that she give “no hints, no forecasts, no previews” about how she might “vote on questions the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide.” As she declared in her opening statement:

A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the specifics of the particular case, it would display disdain for the entire judicial process.

Sanders is saying that Hillary Clinton will ensure that her nominees will forthrightly parade what Ginsburg called disdain for the entire judicial process.

"Donald J. Trump enters the general election campaign laboring under the worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history..."

The NYT reports:

Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.

He has a staff of around 70 people — compared with nearly 700 for Mrs. Clinton — suggesting only the barest effort toward preparing to contest swing states this fall....

Mr. Trump’s cash crunch marks a stark reversal from the 2012 presidential campaign, which seemed to inaugurate a new era of virtually unlimited money in American politics, buoyed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision two years earlier....

Yeah, well, at least it deprives Hillary Clinton of her big talking point about that terrible Citizens United case.

If a liberal Supreme Court Justice replaces Scalia, how many 5-4 conservative precedents will the new 5-person liberal majority overturn?

This is the question that's waking me up in the middle of the night.

I'm thinking of the cases that are coming up in my Constitutional Law classes this week, wondering which ones were decided 5-4, and imagining saying: But if Justice Scalia had died earlier and been replaced by an Obama nominee, this case would have gone the other way. So the case you have read and its inverted version, with the dissents as the majority, are essentially equally good law, distinguished not by reason and logic, but by the hardiness or fragility of the human body. Yes, you need to see that this is the precedent now, but you need also to know that it may be the other way around by the time you graduate. It's naive self-deception to learn the cases as a statement of the law. They are only temporary resting places. And yes, I've devoted my life to teaching people like you about these scurrilous writings, but they were somewhat satisfyingly anchored by this Justice whose time on the Court has spanned my teaching career, who wrote with engaging clarity and vigor. Now comes the deluge of muddled repositionings, couched in tedious verbiage and, bobbing woozily in the muddy water, you will spot a few bright-colored floaty toys, the overrulings.

But first come the articles, written by law professors, like: "How Scalia’s Death Could Shake Up Campaign Finance/It might be the opening reformers have been waiting for," by Richard L. Hasen. Maybe the new liberal majority — if it comes to be — will overturn Citizens United. And yet:

... Supreme Court justices of whatever stripe are reluctant to easily overturn precedent.... It does not look good for Supreme Court precedent to swing like a pendulum, or for lower court judges to ignore Supreme Court rulings, making the boundary between law and politics look ever more porous.

I boldfaced the word "look." I expect the justices to to tend to appearances. It won't look like a pendulum swinging or an ever more porous boundary. It also won't look readably Scaliaesque. The coherence of the changes will be explained in long, complicated opinions that no one will want to read, but that law professors will have to continue to assign and explain.

"Bernie Sanders lets us know that he has no idea how the Supreme Court works."

Says Jaltcoh, displaying a tweet where Bernie Sanders said: "Any Supreme Court nominee of mine will make overturning Citizens United one of their first decisions."

IN THE COMMENTS: Fritz said:

As a professional socialist, Sanders has pretty much made a career out of not knowing how things work. 

ADDED: At ThinkProgress: "Why Bernie Sanders’ Misinformed Supreme Court Tweet Matters."

Elaborate NYT graphic makes me think something quite different from what they want me to think.

"Here are 120 million Monopoly pieces, roughly one for every household in the United States," says the text, and we see a large pile of green Monopoly "houses" (blocking the view of the White House), and when we try to scroll down, the screen zooms in, and we see a few red Monopoly "hotels" on the top of the pile. The text changes to: "Just 158 families have provided nearly half of the early money for efforts to capture the White House."

This is a great graphic. Loved it. But it got me thinking, and I read this:

They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters... Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

Now, first of all, we're talking about spending money on speech, that's what Citizens United "legalized." I'm putting "legalized," in quotes, because what the Supreme Court did in Citizens United was to perceive the existence of a constitutional right, a right to spend money on speech. These are not contributions to the presidential campaigns, but companies [in Citizens United and families and their companies in the NYT study] spending their own money to get their opinions out into the marketplace of ideas, just as The New York Times corporation spends its money to get its ideas out, including its idea that there's something spurious about corporations engaging in political speech.

And, second, if we're talking about families — 158 families — how are they "overwhelmingly... male"? Are there a lot of gay men spending this money or just heterosexual couples who somehow produce far more sons than daughters? Or is it that the NYT is operating within the old stereotype that sees a family with a man in it as headed by the man?

That said, what I really want to talk about is that pile of Monopoly houses, far, far outnumbering the hotels. There are 120 million households, and 158 spend half of what is  spent, and amount that's only $176 million. If all of the households gave just $5, that would be $600 million, vastly overwhelming those supposedly fearsome, overspending, rich, white men. That money could be given directly to that candidate (since it comes, obviously, nowhere near the limit).

Instead of complaining about 158 families spending $176 million (which strikes me as a fairly paltry amount, especially since only $2,700 can be given to a candidate), the clamor should be about the need for everyone to give just a little money to someone. Skip one cup of coffee, one cheeseburger, one movie, and give the money to the candidate you like best. It could be so easy.

And yet bitching about those terrible rich people — those terrible male white people — serves other political interests... interests that the rich white males who own The New York Times have a constitutional right to push with all the powerful rhetoric and lovely graphics they can muster.

ADDED: Why did the NYT draw the line at 158 families? Why not analyze the top 150 families or the top 200? I can't help feeling that the Times drew the line where it would make the other facts seem most dramatic. We're told they contributed "nearly half of the early money." Why not draw the line at exactly half? If we included the next 10% or 20% or 30% of the early money, how many families would we see and how different would the conclusions have to be?

UPDATE: Power Line links to this post and says:

The rich people who own the New York Times, and the reporters and editors who work for them, are very clear about their own First Amendment right to devote corporate assets to weighing in on the issues of the day, but they are eager to deprive everyone else of the same right, especially those who don’t agree with their far-left perspective....

What the New York Times really objects to is diversity. The only way to get free speech nowadays–diverse free speech, anyway–is to pay for it. Thank God there are a handful of people with the means and the will to do so.

And Jaltcoh, at Facebook, quotes my statement — "if we're talking about families — 158 families — how are they 'overwhelmingly... male'?" — and somebody suggests: "Single-person households that only contain men?" That makes me say:

If that's what it is, then I object to the use of the word "families." Has the NYT picked up the sentimentality of politicians, who continually talk about "families," as if single people didn't exist? The word "households" appears in the article, and I think anyone talking about demographics needs to notice the difference between "families" and "households" and be more careful.

A "loophole" that lets candidates — like Carly Fiorina — get away with "coordinating" with Super Pacs.

The NYT seems to be sounding an alert over something completely bland and banal:

The Federal Election Commission forbids direct coordination between campaigns and super PACs, lest candidates effectively rely almost entirely on the huge, unlimited donations of a small number of billionaires. But in 2016, the groups are aggressively exploiting gray areas and loopholes in the rules, few of which the commission – deadlocked with its three Republican and three Democratic members – has hastened to close.

Oh, those terrible deadlocks. Now, what is this loophole that the Commission is allowing to exist?

Candidates and super PACs are free to coordinate their plans if the information is shared in public view.... posting video on YouTube, and... signal[ing] a preference for positive advertising [on] Twitter...

Mrs. Fiorina and other candidates... have taken it a step further: making available advance travel schedules.... Under the rules, Mrs. Fiorina’s super PAC... could not even call her campaign staff members to see where and when she is headed next. But Mrs. Fiorina has cleverly sidestepped that prohibition: Her campaign has created a public Google calendar, which it updates weeks into the future, showing the events she has planned.

Putting video on YouTube, tweeting about the kind of message you want to get out, and having an on-line calendar of upcoming events... that counts as "clever"? I guess "cleverly" bolsters the characterization of the permissibility of this speech as a "loophole" in the campaign finance law. But it's simple, obvious free speech from the candidate. I don't see how the Commission could change this or why we should feel that it should change.

The Times has a quote from campaign finance lawyer: “Essentially, it inoculates a case of coordination by making it public.” Like there's a real disease here. Inoculates.

"If elected president, I will have a litmus test in terms of my nominee to be a Supreme Court justice."

"And that nominee will say that we are all going to overturn this disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United because that decision is undermining American democracy. I do not believe that billionaires should be able to buy politicians."

On Thursday, Clinton also reiterated her support for a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United, a long-shot effort that is nonetheless popular among Democratic activists.

"She said she is going to do everything she can," the attendee said. "She was very firm about this – that this Supreme Court decision is just a disaster."

My thoughts:

[ADDED: FIRST, let me be clear that quote that begins this post is something Bernie Sanders said on one of the Sunday talk shows. The blocked and indented quote is from Hillary, and it's something she said to donors at a closed meeting that was leaked by an attendee whom the Washington Post is keeping anonymous. The Post relates that Hillary "got major applause when she said would not name anybody to the Supreme Court unless she has assurances that they would overturn" Citizens United and calls this a "pledge to use opposition to Citizens United as a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees." I don't know that Hillary ever used the term "litmus test," and it sounds as though she's under pressure because of what Sanders had said.]

1. I don't believe this pledge. I think she's saying this because she thinks it's politically advantageous, so: Why does she think that?

2. Normally, what Presidents and presidential candidates say is that they don't have any "litmus test." It's been considered politic to act as though you are choosing Justices in a soberly meritocratic fashion, posing as if you value judicial independence and cases decided according to the law. These Presidents and presidential candidates may nevertheless have a litmus test, of course. They just choose not to say so.

3. Citizens United! is an incantation, but who is it for, who responds to it and why? Very few people have much understanding of what the case was actually about, so incanting Citizens United! is a pretty idiotic approach to politics. I suspect Hillary Clinton has a good deal of contempt for the little people of America whom she needs to like her and who did not find her likable enough last time.

4. One thing Citizens United was about was a movie about Hillary, "Hillary: The Movie":

"To single out the Clintons for having wealthy friends who might want favors later, especially in the political context brought to us by the destruction of campaign finance regulations..."

"... is a particularly laughable application of the Clinton Rules which, like the Voting Rights Act and McCain-Feingold, have been rendered irrelevant by Citizens United and its unholy progeny."

Writes Charles Pierce at Esquire in a piece titled "The Return To Mena Airport: It Begins Again/In which we learn that rich people like the Clintons have lots of money."

I copied that sentence because it's such a mess of a sentence, almost as much of a jumble as that title. (Do you remember Mena Airport? Mena-ither.) I don't know how disordered the mind of Charles Pierce really is. I'm sure his style amuses the people it amuses, and I assume those people are people who respond to Citizens United!!!!

But Pierce's invocation of the much-invoked case name comes in a context of very specific misrepresentation of the meaning of that case. Citizens United and its "unholy progeny" involve judges doing judicial work — saying what rights are and putting constitutional law in its proper place in the hierarchy of law, above statutes.

We could talk about whether we agree with the interpretation of the First Amendment in those cases, in which the Supreme Court has invalidated some statutory restrictions on spending money to propagate political speech, but that's not what Pierce is talking about. He's not talking about how statutes and constitutional law are sorted out by judges in court cases. He's talking about the political debate among us, The People. A candidate's wealth and how it was acquired and whether he might be beholden to some interests or even corrupt are going to be issues as we decide whether we want to vote for that candidate. Citizens United and its "unholy progeny" don't say we voters shouldn't concern ourselves with such things. In fact, Citizens United makes a point of upholding disclosure requirements, so that voters get more information about where money is coming from:

The Wall Street Journal urges the U.S. Supreme Court to take the free-speech case arising out of Wisconsin's John Doe investigation.

You can get to the editorial here:

On Friday the Justices will consider whether to hear O’Keefe v. Chisholm, a Section 1983 civil-rights lawsuit brought by Wisconsin Club for Growth director Eric O’Keefe against Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm and other prosecutors. The suit charges the prosecutors with a multi-year campaign to silence and intimidate conservative groups whose political speech they don’t like....

The 7th Circuit's decision was based not on the merits but on deference to the ongoing proceedings in state court, which theoretically could have responded to the federal constitutional questions. That is: the Younger abstention doctrine. I discussed the 7th Circuit opinion when it came out last September, saying:

There is an exception to the Younger doctrine, which the plaintiffs tried to use here, that applies when the federal rights claimants show that the prosecutors in state court are proceeding in "bad faith." The question is whether the prosecutors are really attempting to secure a valid conviction or whether they are simply using the legal process to harass the federal court plaintiffs. The 7th Circuit panel found some perplexity in the free speech issues about campaign coordination:

The Supreme Court has yet to determine what “coordination” means. Is the scope of permissible regulation limited to groups that advocate the election of particular candidates, or can government also regulate coordination of contributions and speech about political issues, when the speakers do not expressly advocate any person’s election? What if the speech implies, rather than expresses, a preference for a particular candidate’s election? If regulation of coordination about pure issue advocacy is permissible, how tight must the link be between the politician’s committee and the advocacy group? Uncertainty is a powerful reason to leave this litigation in state court, where it may meet its end as a matter of state law without any need to resolve these constitutional questions.

This is a nudge to the state judge to shut down the investigation, and yet there is something very disturbing about this ambiguity in free speech law and the leeway it gives prosecutors to stall a political group throughout a campaign season. I'd like to see the Supreme Court make this clear....

Back to the WSJ editorial:

Specific injustices aside, the U.S. Justices should also hear the case because it is part of a larger legal effort to subvert their 2010 Citizens United ruling. The game is to use the theory of “coordination,” which allows vast investigations to be instigated on the thinnest evidence, to sweep issue speech back into the regulatory umbrella of campaign-finance law.

The liberal Brennan Center for Justice is pushing regulations coast to coast that would reduce protections for issue speakers and encourage “coordination” probes. The Wisconsin case is an opening for the Court to tell prosecutors and regulators they must tread carefully when rights of free association are involved.

Wisconsin’s prosecutorial machinery has abused the law to silence disfavored political speech. This one is made to order for Supreme Court review.

I agree. The Court needs to take this case. Quite aside from all the substantive problems, the idea of deferring to the state courts is supposed to be based on the ability of the state courts to step up and deal with the substantive problems themselves. The 7th Circuit decision came out 7 months ago. Where's the action from the state courts? If there are indeed free-speech violations, they've been going on for 3 years. It's one thing for federal courts to refrain from jumping into state court proceedings that might do a decent-enough job of enforcing federal rights. But here, these proceedings have worked to suppress political speech for 2 election cycles and beyond. It's quite shocking.

"The Left’s Recusal Gambit/A prosecutor and his allies try to rig a judicial appeal in Wisconsin."

That's the title of a Wall Street Journal editorial that follows on a recent NYT editorial titled "Elusive Justice in Wisconsin."

From the WSJ:

If you’re a special prosecutor who keeps losing on the law, try rigging the judges. That’s the gambit in Wisconsin, where special prosecutor Francis Schmitz has filed a motion prodding judges to recuse themselves.

Justice Alito, in Hobby Lobby, adds to the corporations-are-people discourse.

I have a corporations are people tag for a reason. Remember when Romney said those words? Much more at the tag. This is a discourse I have been following. The haters of Citizens United love to mock this idea, and it may have seemed especially mockable in the context of religion. (Can a corporation pray?!!)

From today's opinion upholding a corporation's challenge under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of the contraception coverage requirement under Obamacare:

As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons.” But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have ae a stake in the corporations’ financial well-being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.

There is also some excellent discussion of why people might choose a for-profit corporate form when they have purposes other than just to make money:

Not all corporations that decline to organize as nonprofits do so in order to maximize profit. For example, organizations with religious and charitable aims might organize as for-profit corporations because of the potential advantages of that corporate form, such as the freedom to participate in lobbying for legislation or campaigning for political candidates who promote their religious or charitable goals. In fact, recognizing the inherent compatibility between establishing a for-profit corporation and pursuing nonprofit goals, States have increasingly adopted laws formally recognizing hybrid corporate forms. Over half of the States, for instance, now recognize the “benefit corporation,” a dual-purpose entity that seeks to achieve both abenefit for the public and a profit for its owners.

"Americans’ willingness to accept the Supreme Court’s mystical role is partly a symptom of disappointment in our own democratic capacities."

"Congress is the most directly representative body of the federal government, and almost no one sees it as having principled authority or moral charisma. Hoping that the Supreme Court will make us better than we can otherwise be, better than our own representative institutions, is neither self-respecting nor very likely to succeed."

Writes lawprof Jedediah Purdy in a very layperson-accessible presentation of the progressive case against judicial review. I think he's quite wrong, by the way.

Expect to see much more of this sort of thing in the press as Erwin Chemerinsky's book "The Case Against the Supreme Court," hits the market this September. From the book's description at Amazon:

Lawprof Jonathan Turley ties together the Redskins decision, the IRS denying tax exemptions, and the FEC deciding what counts as "electioneering."

This is an excellent column that goes way beyond what's suggested by the headline, "The patent office goes out of bounds in Redskins trademark case." Here's where he ends up:

When agencies engage in content-based speech regulation, it’s more than the usual issue of “mission creep.” ... [A]gencies now represent something like a fourth branch in our government — an array of departments and offices that exercise responsibilities once dedicated exclusively to the judicial and legislative branches....

What is needed is a new law returning these agencies to their core regulatory responsibilities and requiring speech neutrality in enforcement. We do not need faceless federal officials to become arbiters of our social controversies. There are valid objections to the Redskins name, but it is a public controversy that demands a public resolution, not a bureaucratic one.

Read the whole thing.

"The title of the proposed amendment... 'Restore Democracy to the American People'... is nothing but a perversion of the English language."

Said the venerable First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. The proposed constitutional amendment is designed to overrule the Supreme Court's free speech doctrine that limits what legislatures can do to control spending on political campaigns.

The notion that democracy has already been lost, as we begin what will obviously be a hard fought election season in which virtually anything can and will be said, could be dismissed as rather typical Washington rhetorical overkill. But the notion that democracy would be advanced – saved, “restored” – by limiting speech is nothing but a perversion of the English language. It brings to mind George Orwell’s observation, in his enduring essay “Politics and the English Language,” that “[i]n our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” and that the word “democracy,” in particular, “has several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with each other” and “is often used in a consciously dishonest way.”  So let me say in the most direct manner that it is deeply, profoundly, obviously undemocratic to limit speech about who to elect to public office.

IN THE COMMENTS: Tyrone Slothrop said "Ted Cruz was similarly awesome yesterday":