Howard Dean: ‘Radical Right’ Supreme Court ‘Bought and Paid For’
On Tuesday night’s edition of The Rachel Maddow Show, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean slashed at the “radical right” justices on the Supreme Court as “bought and paid for” by billionaires like the Koch brothers (who “don’t fundamentally believe in democracy”) and are “selling America to the corporations.” But what about the liberal justices? Dean didn’t think there were any: “Barack Obama has appointed two very solid middle-of-the-road justices” in Sotomayor and Kagan. Maddow raised the idea of the court ruling against remedial campaign subsidization in Arizona: MADDOW: To the extent that political institutions matter, that it is not just the preferences of the people sort of magically or directly translated into policy, to the extent that the way things run affects the outcomes, we just had the ruling from the Supreme Court this week that Arizona`s publicly-financed election system is unconstitutional, that the state — that the state of Arizona, according to the Supreme Court, is not allowed to give people public financing in a way that levels the playing field between publicly-financed candidates and self-financed rich guy candidates. Are we now — are we now looking at a position, though, in which not only we`ve got a Citizens United sort of corporate funded atmosphere, but the ability for public policy to sort of remedy that is being hampered, that there isn`t going to be a possibility for publicly financed elections as a way around this problem. DEAN: Well, you know, this is a very political Supreme Court. They are bought and paid for essentially by the same people that elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan who basically put the majority of the Supreme Court on. What do you expect them to do? They are basically selling America to corporations. But that can be fixed too, over time. Barack Obama has appointed two very solid middle-of-the-road justices, and hopefully, he`ll get a chance to appoint a couple more and we`ll have a Supreme Court that`s more in keeping with where America really wants to go. I don`t believe that this Supreme Court represents anything like what the average American believes. I do not believe that most Americans think that a corporation ought to have the same rights as a person. But that`s what this Supreme Court has given them. Earlier, he really laid into the Koch brothers, because apparently advocating for capitalism is the very opposite of democracy. Notice how Democrats always define “democracy” as “when Democrats win”? The Supreme Court, the four radical right justices, plus the conservative, Anthony Kennedy, have teamed up to really make it possible to buy America. What you see is the slow erosion of American democracy. These people are doing these things, the Koch brothers — they don`t really fundamentally believe in democracy. They really are stripping the votes. The New Hampshire speaker, for example, said that college students shouldn`t be allowed to vote in New Hampshire, because they`re too liberal and don`t understand what`s going on. Look, you can attack unions and we can argue about whether that`s a good thing or not. I obviously don`t think it is. But when you`re talking away fundamentally people`s right to vote, when you`re investing enormous amounts from anonymous billionaires in getting your people to vote and keeping other people from voting by influencing politicians — these governors that went out there, they`re bought and paid for by billionaires. And this does not help the ordinary American working people. It doesn`t even help most party people in the Tea Party, in the real Tea Party, the grassroots people. And I think this is going to — they`re going to get paid back for this, in this election, which is why I think Obama is going to win by a lot. Dean naturally regressed back to suggesting the Chinese communists were somehow behind FreedomWorks. Does that make sense to anybody? We know that foreign corporations — money was given to the Chamber of Commerce in the last election cycle. We can`t prove it was used in the elections. It was all mingled together, though. They could be. But I think there`s a greater danger than whether the Chinese is giving money to FreedomWorks. I think the Koch brothers are a danger to America. What they put together enough money in the Tea Party, so they won the Raleigh School District in North Carolina, and they got rid of the desegregation policy. This is not a group of people that are in favor of America. This is a group of people who want who take over America so they can get richer and they`re a fundamentally mean people that hate working people in this country. And I think we`re going to have to make some changes. And I think the American people are going to make changes.
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Howard Dean: ‘Radical Right’ Supreme Court ‘Bought and Paid For’
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on June 30, 2011. Filed under