Justice Stevens defends Obama
Obama was right to criticize the 2010 ruling on campaign funding, Stevens says.
He says criticism of Citizens United ruling was on target.
WASHINGTON — President Obama ruffled feathers two years ago when he criticized the Supreme Court during a State of the Union speech for its Citizens United decision. It was unusual for a president to criticize the justices as they sat before him.
Now, retired Justice John Paul Stevens has taken the equally unusual step of saying the president was right to target the court’s opinion.
Obama said the 5-4 decision freeing corporations to spend unlimited sums on elections “reversed a century of law,” adding that it would “open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”
Speaking Wednesday evening in Little Rock, Ark., Stevens said:
“In that succinct comment, the former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago made three important and accurate observations about the Supreme Court majority’s opinion. First, it did reverse a century of law; second, it did authorize unlimited election-related expenditures by America’s most powerful interests; and third, the logic of the opinion extends to money spent by foreign entities.”
Stevens dissented from the 2010 decision, and reiterated Wednesday that he could not understand why, since “corporations have no right to vote,” they should have the right to sway elections.
Already in this election year, staggering amounts of money from unknown donors have fueled multimillion-dollar-ad campaigns.
The justice also said he did not see why those with the most money should be permitted to dominate the airwaves during election campaigns.
“During the televised debates among the Republican candidates for the presidency, the moderators made an effort to allow each speaker an equal opportunity to express his or her views,” Stevens said. If there were six candidates, he said, they were given roughly the same amount of time.
“Both the candidates and the audience would surely have thought the value of the debate to have suffered if the moderator had allocated the time on the basis of the speakers’ wealth, or if they had held an auction allowing the most time to the highest bidder,” Stevens said.
Stevens, now 92, was appointed to the court by President Ford in 1975. He retired in 2010, and Obama chose Justice Elena Kagan to replace him.
Obama awarded Stevens aPresidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday.