The Consequences
The success of the Powell-Chamber of Commerce plan transformed American law, government, and society, with two devastating consequences for the country. First, corporations gained vastly increased political power at the expense of average citizens. Corporations poured out money to lobbying and election campaigns and to help friendly politicians and hurt unfriendly politicians. With even modest reform crushed by corporate rights decisions such as First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti—and now much more so, Citizens United—corporations could threaten and deliver “independent expenditure” campaigns against politicians who did not bend their way. Corporate money to influence legislative votes and politician behavior lost its scandalous, shameful nature. Bags of corporate cash were no longer bags of cash; they were “speech.” How could “speech” be corrupt or scandalous?
Washington, D.C., and many state capitals became playgrounds for corporate lobbyists, and our elected representatives became increasingly disconnected from the will of the people. With the new, organized corporate radicalism, staggering amounts of corporate money flooded Washington, D.C., and our political system. Between 1998 and 2013, for example, the Chamber of Commerce alone spent more than $1 billion on lobbying.
Pharmaceutical and health care corporations spent more than $5.7 billion on lobbying in those years. Three corporations seeking military contracts—Northrop Grumman Corporation, Lockheed, and Boeing—spent more than $660 million on lobbying. GE Corporation ($298 million), AT&T ($162 million), the pharmaceutical lobby PHRMA ($246 million), ExxonMobil ($193 million), Verizon ($183 million), and many more corporations all joined the lobby-fest. In the states, corporate-funded lobbying entities such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network began to dominate legislatures. Financial, labor, energy, environmental, health care, trade, and other policy tilted sharply in favor of corporate interests; the hurdles for advancing the public interest became much higher.
Second, “corporate rights” created a corporate trump card over public interest laws. If laws that were inconvenient to corporate business models somehow made it through the lobbyist machine, corporations now had constitutional “rights” to attack the laws in the courts. It no longer mattered if the majority of people and our representatives chose laws to curb pollution, require disclosure, protect the public health, or nurture small businesses and local economies. The democratic process was no longer enough to decide the issue. After the creation of “corporate speech” rights, it was now up to judges, rather than the people, to decide whether the law served an “important” interest and was not too “burdensome.”
And not just any judges would make these decisions. As with the other branches of government, corporations have captured the courts. Several recent studies by legal scholars confirm that the current Supreme Court favors corporations over people more than ever before, and the impartiality of justice in the states is eroding rapidly. After Citizens United, corporate interests began dumping ever more money into state judicial elections. In twenty state Supreme Court elections in 2012, the campaigns spent $56 million (compared with less than $6 million in 1990). Ten donors alone contributed $19.6 million, with much of the money coming from R. J. Reynolds Tobacco and other corporations. According to the American Constitution Society, “The data confirm a significant relationship between business group contributions to state supreme court justices and the voting of those justices in cases involving business matters.”