Best Week Ever

Well, since Obama took office anyway. It's been a good week for (I don't want to say Conservatives) it's been a good week for those of us that prefer to run our own lives and make up our own minds. There was the Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205. Hopefully you're familiar with the details. For some reason I can't understand the common liberal sees this as judicial activism. I can understand the leadership of Liberalism being up in arms but shouldn't celebrities and the average joe consider free speech for everyone a good thing? On Twitter Rainn Wilson tweeted this message.

The S.C. essentially re-wrote the const. making corps have same rits as 'citizens'. Just admit u like jud. activism that supports yr beliefs

Rainn, whom I love by the way, didn't seem to think this out very well. Either that or he's ignoring the fact that had this law been applied equally to everyone, the world wouldn't have been treated to a couple of the great masterpiece documentaries from Michael Moore, not really such a bad thing. Every radio and television station, every movie production company is a corporation. Is it a stretch then to go from the government that Citizen's United can't run ads for their anti-Hilary DVD to saying MSNBC can't report negatively on the President (like that would happen anyway). Rainn and Erwin Chemerinski and several other people hold that belief that the Supreme Court was doing a little legislation from the bench. They argue that the Supreme Court over-ruled a 20 year law and somehow that is wrong. Should the laws permitting slavery have been allowed to stand because they had already been written? What a ridiculous argument.

The big fear seems to be that special interests will be able to spend huge amounts on election time ads. This seems too be a bad thing because the assumption is the American voter is too ignorant to figure things out by his or herself. I would point to the Tea Parties and Massachusetts election as proof to the contrary. As a matter of fact, I think it's been the rule and Obama becoming President was the exception. Here's a good quote from Thomas Jefferson:

"It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."

Well, that's my take on it anyway. Here is John Samples and Ilya Shapiro's take on it from the Cato Institute's website. And here is the PDF opinion from the court itself. I don't know the ends and out of all of this and what it might mean but I can't help but feel it's a good thing. If there is one negative in this whole thing it's that the court was split 5-4. That's kind of scary.