Supreme our Ruling Threatens Democracy

“Ordinary Americans will be able to vote, but they will not be represented” --Miller

Senator Mark Miller hypothesizes the negative consequences of the Supreme Court’s ruling this year that permits corporations to spend uncapped amounts on elections in an opinion piece from the Isthmus.

Senator Miller believes that money buys power, and monopolizing politics into the “megacorporate players” means “drowning out the will of the people,” which is his ethical appeal against this ruling. He believes it is unconstitutional to muffle out the voice of the citizens, which is what this ruling does; the voices that matter are the ones coming from corporate checkbooks, and the ruling broke 100 years of precedent keeping the people paramount in making political choices. “Bloodless corporations will not be able to vote,” Miller writes, “but they will most certainly be represented, at all levels of government.” It seems as though the act of voting itself will become an empty gesture.

Elections and political campaigns today are races to spread information to the voters, which is one of the reasons campaigns spend so much funding on telecommunications. The Supreme Court’s ruling “opens the floodgates for corporate political spending,” which Miller suggests was an inevitable outcome of the Bush administration. When corporations control the candidates, they can promote or prohibit political progress by sponsorship (or threat to cease sponsorship). Miller sees this as detrimental to the basic freedoms of a U.S. citizen.

He blames the Bush administration’s corporate-friendly attitude for “the Great Recession of 2008” and claims that Wall Street and pharmaceutical companies actually “drafted legislation for Congress to pass.” While Miller’s intent is to encourage voters to be wary of protecting their constitutional rights, he states his conclusions about the Bush legacy without any specificities. This makes his attack seem more like an elephant jab than substantial, irrevocable evidence for his case. A warning without proof is scary, maybe effective (like yelling ‘shark!’ at a beach), but not going to save anyone if it is not backed up factually.

Miller’s biggest fallacy is the contingent train of conclusions that begins reasonably and ends, well, who quite knows where: the Supreme Court now allows corporations to donate to elections unrestrictedly→these corporations will become bigger motivators for candidates than the citizen opinion→America will go into an economic recession→there is no check on the Supreme Court, which is out of balance and taking away our freedoms→the government will no longer belong to the people, and instead will become a corporate puppet. While it is one possible outcome for the ruling, it is a scare tactic to raise awareness and communicate a sense of communal outrage and camaraderie, not an appeal to logos.

“Let’s not revert…” Miller urges his audience. Let’s not, as if we are a collective democratic portrait of America. While his claim is effective in empowering the reader to be part of his protest, he assumes that his audience is on his side and is democratic. “As voters, we need to be very critical…we need to insist…we need to be very angry…” he says. He writes as if he—an elected official—is not part of the politics but part of the vulnerable citizens. It nearly seems deceitful for him to not admit his office or consider it with his argument.