Obama vs the Supreme Court

Betsy Newmark writes about Obama's SOTU dig at the Supreme Court, saying: You'd think a former professor of Constitutional law would know better

During the speech, the President made a direct dig at the Supreme Court for their decision in Citizens United and alleges that they allowed foreign corporations to spend unlimited money in our elections. Bradley Smith, the former head of the FEC sets the record straight.

...The president's statement is false.

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case. Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any "expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication... ."

This is either blithering ignorance of the law, or demogoguery of the worst kind.

Smith is right. Either he's ignorant, or he's deliberately lying. Thinking of how State of the Union addresses get scrubbed by all sorts of advisers in the White House, it's hard to believe that everyone there ignored that line. I think it must have been a deliberate obfuscation of the law and the ruling. No wonder Samuel Alito in the audience was shaking his head that this wasn't true.

As I think about that line, I realized that, while I'd read quite a bit of commentary on the Court's decision, I hadn't seen anywhere that point about foreign corporations. No wonder, because it's not part of the decision so no one would have been talking about it. It had to be something that either Obama or some equally ignorant adviser in the White House thought of. It was too good for them to check and they figured that it would be a good demagogic line to insert into the speech.

It sounds like Barack Obama's been working above his pay grade for a year now.