12,399 views

, 20 tweets, 3 min read

"Eight years of practicing law under the Obama administration had taught us not to expect any solutions from mainstream Democratic Party politicians.

While Obama inherited the Great Recession from George W. Bush, his administration failed to make 'even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis' (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian 1/23/2013).

Many of our clients had been direct victims of this crisis, losing their retirement investments or even their homes as a consequence of criminal malfeasance in the banking industry.

Aside from the fact that the Obama administration’s inaction will ensure that another, similar crisis happens again, it set the general tone for the continuation of a legal system which is rigged to guarantee that corporate interests will escape accountability time and again.

While ‘Citizens United’ was the product of, to quote retired federal appellate judge Richard Posner, five “extremely reactionary Supreme Court justices” appointed by Republican presidents (Robert, Kennedy, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas),

the Obama administration failed to prioritize the making of appointments to the federal bench—the one branch of government which has the power to neutralize the deleterious effects of ‘Citizens United, i.e.’, by overruling the case.

To the contrary, Obama left office with over one hundred judicial vacancies unfilled—nearly double what he inherited from his predecessor.

Obama’s failure on judicial appointments is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that he is the only president in U.S. history who proved to be incapable of filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Obama’s lack of appreciation for the serious problems inherent in our ‘very crappy’ judicial system seemed characteristic of the Democratic Party’s general attitude.

For example, while the class action—killing opinions, ‘Concepcion’ and ‘Walmart’, were issued in 2011 by the same cabal of ‘extremely reactionary’ Justices responsible for ‘Citizens United’,

unlike the latter, the class action—killing opinions turned on issues of statutory interpretation, not constitutional law. Accordingly—and unlike ‘Citizens United’—the negative effects of these ill-conceived decisions may be reversed by acts of Congress.

Nonetheless, congressional Democrats (who controlled both the House and Senate up until 2012) made only half-hearted attempts to pass such legislation, culminating in the proposed Arbitration Fairness Act of 2011.

The bill, which would have made arbitration clauses unenforceable with respect to most types of class actions, never even made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee for a full vote.

Given the lackluster Democratic response to the judicial evisceration of individual rights vis-à-vis corporations,

it was not hard to conclude that the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party is beholden to the same corporate interests motivating the Republican Justices who stripped away these rights to begin with.

When the Supreme Court decided ‘Citizens United’ it went out of its way to rule that corporations cannot be stopped from making unlimited, independent expenditures on political campaigns.

In removing any limitations on what it referred to as ‘corporate speech’,

the Supreme Court laid the vital groundwork for what has become known as the Super PAC: political fundraising committees which can raise unlimited amounts of cash from corporations (as well as unions, associations, and individuals) for independent expenditures on campaigns.