Supremes screw democracy again

NY Times -   The Supreme Court lifted limits on Tuesday on how much political parties can spend on advertising and other expenses in coordination with candidates.  The 6-to-3 decision, divided along ideological lines, is a major victory for Republicans and could undercut one of the Democrats’ financial advantages going into the midterms.

The question before the justices was whether current federal limits on such spending — called coordinated party expenditures — violate the First Amendment. During oral arguments, Noel J. Francisco, a lawyer for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which brought the legal challenge, told the justices that such limits were “at war” with previous decisions by the court that have found that restricting how money can be spent in politics amounts to limiting speech.

…. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the ruling was a recipe for corruption, allowing donors to skirt contribution caps to candidates. “With no limits on coordinated expenditures,” she wrote, “the party can serve as the candidate’s checking account.”

She said that the upshot of the court’s campaign finance decisions was “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”