When the only options before us are geared toward harm, it’s time to rewrite the choices.

By Michelle W. Martin, CRUS Social Media Coordinator, Feb 26, 2022.

There’s a strategy employed by many parents of toddler-sized children when the inevitable, yet sad time comes to leave the playground—perhaps you are familiar with it. The technique gives children a sense of control by offering carefully curated choices. For example, rather than saying abruptly, “okay, let’s go,” which might be met with cries of despair, one might say “Do you want to do the monkey bars or the slide one more time before we go?” or “For our last round of tag do you want me to chase you or do you want to chase me?”

It’s only a matter of time however before the kids catch on. Eventually, they realize that this sense of control is merely a ruse and will reply to such questions with “Neither! I want to keep playing!”

Or better yet, is when they try out the strategy on an adult: “Are you giving me the tub of ice cream or that plate of cookies for dessert?”

Typically parents don’t go along with a toddler’s reverse engineered choices…So why then are We the People going along with the corporate equivalent of ice cream tubs or cookie plates?

We care about the health of our youth when it comes to overdoing sweets and we care about the health of the planet that ultimately supports our own wellbeing. Just as we provide appropriate choices for those in our care, we should frame our own political debate, choose who our candidates will be, and elect the best ones to serve us. Somehow we’ve lost our way and are going along with corporate engineered choices that even the most savvy kids would put a stop to…

  • We are choosing where to site a devastating industry rather than whether to allow it to operate at all.
  • We are arguing over how much pollution to allow rather than if we should even allow the emissions.
  • We are deciding how hot is too hot rather than forbidding any more warming to our planet.
  • We are deciding how much damage we can live with to our life support systems rather than whether to allow any damage at all.

Money influences elections. At the most fundamental level it often affects the choices we have—even who the candidates will be and what issues will be on the ballot…and then once the choices are before us, it influences the outcome.

And as for these choices, the corporate money that has flooded our elections and warped our political discourse is dictating choices that do not serve life or health or well being.

And that is how we know the choices must change.

But changing the choices has proven to be tricky. How do we get the money out? Where’s the leak; why is the money gushing in? The 2010 case of Citizens United v. FEC seems like an obvious choice. The Supreme Court overturned congressional limits to corporate campaign contributions with this case. But it only was possible because of three decisions that came before it. The Citizens United decision was only an expansion of a decision from 1976 called Buckley v. Valeo  in which Supreme Court justices decided that political money was equivalent to free speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court could say that this money equals protected free speech and could not be limited by Congress because they treated the legal fiction known as a corporation as protected under the U.S. Constitution. But did you know that the U.S. Constitution does not mention corporations?

The only way they could justify this was by looking to an earlier case. The Supreme Court decision from 1819 of Dartmouth College v. Woodward turned a privilege into a right—the privilege granted by the people for corporations to do business for a limited time into a protected contract. In other words, it turned out to be the dream come true of the corporate toddler. It took what before then had been the privilege to enjoy more time at the park if they behaved well into a contract or promise that We the Parents couldn’t take away.

It’s like the Justices were renegade grandparents whose only wish was to spoil the grandkids and ignore our parental authority and our rights to decide what is best for our family. Their short-sighted desire to give the tots what they want is to the detriment of all.

But wait, who gave these Supreme Court Justices the right to decide over Congress—the people’s representatives—what the family rules should be? A case from even earlier called Marbury v. Madison (1809) was when the justices declared they could interpret the rules however they wanted, because they are the Supremes and they could use what has become known as judicial review.

Judges are not supreme and judge-made law is constitutionally illegitimate. The courts aren’t supposed to make law. Period. We need to reign in the outsized influence of the courts and the corporations and bring sanity back to our discussions. We should not accept the legitimacy of ill-conceived decisions by long-gone Supreme Court justices. Times have changed and we know better now.

Think of the enlightened parent the next time you are given a false choice orchestrated by a soulless wealth-amassing legal fiction.

Then say in a confident, matter-of-fact grown-up voice, “Neither! We want to keep living!”

Photo credit: Mockaroon on Unsplash.