During last night\u2019s State of the Union address the Executive and Judicial branches crashed head on. While six of the current Supreme Court Justices sat just feet away from President Obama, he called them out publicly. “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. While many in the House Chamber cheered and stood to their feet, Justice Samuel Alito was clearly seen shaking his head and appeared to mouth the words, \u201cnot true.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s landmark decision which lifted restrictions on corporate and union money flowing into elections was a 5-4 split, with plenty of strong words on both sides. It unquestionably changed campaign finance law, but it left untouched the provisions of U.S. law that currently ban \u201cforeign nationals\u201d from pouring money into our elections. The statute goes on to define those prohibited from giving as partnerships, associations, corporations or other groups organized under the laws of, or having their principal place of business in, a foreign country.<\/p>\n
David Bossie, the plaintiff behind last week\u2019s Supreme Court ruling, says he\u2019s surprised that someone who claims to be a Constitutional scholar could misinterpret what the Supreme Court did. Of the President, Bossie told Fox News, \u201cSome will call it a lie, others will call it political posturing, but I think it\u2019s a fundamental error.\u201d Others argue there is a possible loophole that would allow U.S. subsidiaries of foreign entities to contribute. Josh Israel of the Center for Public Integrity says, \u201cIt\u2019s not inconceivable that you could see the CITGO corporation, which is an American operation but happens to be owned by the government of Venezuela, spending $25 million on [campaign] advertisements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Justice Alito isn\u2019t publicly responding or commenting about last night\u2019s speech, but it clearly served as the President\u2019s warning shot that he supports legislation that will answer last week\u2019s Supreme Court ruling. It\u2019s something Democrats on Capitol Hill have been calling for, and they now have a very public ally moving forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During last night\u2019s State of the Union address the Executive and Judicial branches crashed head on. While six of the current Supreme Court Justices sat just feet away from President Obama, he called them out publicly. “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4741,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4741"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}