Hope and Fail

Alito’s right: What Obama said is ‘not true’

With six members of the Supreme Court sitting in the audience, President Obama attacked the court over its recent decision in Citizens United v. FEC during the State of the Union Address. The ruling overturned parts of the McCain / Feingold campaign finance reform bill of 2002.

The president characterized it this way:

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. (Applause.) I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. (Applause.) They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.

During that section of the speech, the cameras in the chamber panned to the six justices in attendance, and Justice Samuel Alito can be seen mouthing the words, “no true.”

Let’s ignore, for a moment, that the president was taking a swipe at the Supreme Court during an event choreographed to show the three branches of government united.

It is unclear to which statement exactly Alito was reacting, but it is clear that the president was wrong about the court’s decision. The Supreme Court did not strike down a “century of law.” McCain / Feingold is not yet 8-years-old. What’s more, the decision does not “open the floodgates” for foreign entities to contribute willy-nilly to American political campaigns.

From the National Review:

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making “a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election” under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case. Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any “expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication.”

And from the New York Times:

Indeed, Mr. Obama’s description of the holding of the case was imprecise. He said the court had “reversed a century of law.”

The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries — as opposed to their political action committees — on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election. It is true, though, that the majority wrote so broadly about corporate free speech rights as to call into question other limitations as well — although not necessarily the existing ban on direct contributions.

So not only did the president break with the decorum of the evening, his “facts” of the case were completely wrong.

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