Why the Supreme Court Matters
There are only nine justices, but they affect millions of us.
By a series of recent 5 to 4 decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court is tipping the scales in the political arena in favor of Wall Street and corporate tycoons. At the same time, right-wing lawmakers are trying to weaken workers’ political strength by taking away their collective bargaining rights. This ominous trend demonstrates why who sits on the nation’s highest court matters to working-class Americans.
The most important of those decisions, Citizens United v. FEC, held that corporations can spend unlimited funds on advertisements supporting or opposing candidates for federal office – as long as those ads are made independently of the campaigns they support.
But the decision, handed down in January 2010, overwhelmingly favored Big Business against workers, because unions have only a small fraction of the money corporations have to influence elections. During the 2010 election, for every $1 the labor movement spent, business interests spent $19.
Pres. Barack Obama decried the Citizens United ruling as “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
The same right-wing bloc of the court expanded that ruling this June to state and local elections in a case from Montana called American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock. Now, the court’s right wing has limited the power of workers to influence elections at every level of government by lifting the last reliable checks on the ability of the wealthy to spend their way to even more power.
The court swung toward Big Business again in June, this time in a case called Knox v. Service Employees International Union, Local 1000. In this instance, the court’s right-wing bloc again showed its hostility to unions by ignoring decades of precedent on a union’s legitimate use of its funds to advocate for pro-union, pro-worker candidates and policies. In effect, it exacerbated the double standard for corporations and unions in political fundraising. Once again, workers lost.
The court’s far right majority has shown by these rulings that it is not a friend of working families. While, on occasion, the court does hand down decisions we applaud, its anti-worker majority continues to push the nation’s highest court toward Wall Street and further away from Main Street.
There is something AFSCME members can do to help swing the balance toward fairness. Through our political action program, PEOPLE, we can raise the resources to help us get out our message that workers’ rights should not be trampled in the rush to build massive corporate profits. We can knock on doors and make phone calls to get out the vote for worker-friendly candidates, and vote to re-elect President Obama in November.
The Supreme Court is powerful — its judges are appointed for life. The court will become more worker-friendly only if there’s a vacancy filled by a re-elected President Obama.
