60 Minutes talking to a leftist Supreme Court Justice. Blind leading the blind and both fell into the ditch.

I went into the Scott Pelley interview with retired Justice John Paul Stevens with low expectations and I was not disappointed. It was correctly mentioned that Stevens had been nominated by Gerald Ford as a moderate Republican, but eventually became the leader of the Court’s liberal wing. Something happens to people who spend too much time in DC, but that’s another story for another day.

First, the issue of the 2000 Presidential election. Pelley asked Stevens whether the recount of the Bush victory over Al Gore should’ve continued.  Predictably, Stevens said it should’ve continued. What was missing from the interview were two critical points. Pelley never asked the follow-up question; “Okay, if it should’ve continued, which standard should’ve been used?” Remember, the main issue was over how to count votes and how the various standards used led to much of the confusion. Democrats love election recounts to go as long as possible until they have enough votes to win. Anybody wish to challege my contention using the last decade of election history?

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Fans of the First Amendment can rejoice.  In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down large portions of the abomination known as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, especially those aspects of the law that imposed restrictions on corporate spending on political issues.

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

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