What the Economic Royalists of the 1930s were unable to do with the Business Plot against FDR—that is, successfully launch a coup d’état—the Koch brothers and the Economic Royalists of today were determined to do against Barack Obama in 2010. This time they would use money instead of an army.
But their coup wouldn’t be complete without one final gift handed down by the Supreme Court.
CHAPTER 9
Betrayal on the High Court
[The] activist element of the Supreme Court struck down key protections of our elections integrity, overturned the will of Congress and the American people, and allowed all corporations to spend without limit in order to elect and defeat candidates and influence policy to meet their political ends. The consequences may well be nightmarish.
The day after President Obama’s inauguration, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was called back to the White House. He needed to take care of some unfinished business.
At just past seven thirty that evening, Roberts and President Obama stood face-to-face in the Map Room of the White House. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt used the room to discuss war strategy with his generals as they pored over map after map of the European battlefield, hence the name given to the room. Today, some of those maps still hang on the walls.
Previous presidents, such as Calvin Coolidge, used the room for billiards, and to this day, with only a red paisley couch and two matching high-back chairs, a low-hanging polished wooden table, and a few delicately crafted desks and end tables placed near the walls, the room is still barely furnished, and there’s more than enough space to drag a pool table into the center of it. The Map Room is now mostly used for interviews and private meetings, but on this night, it was to be used for a do-over of the presidential oath of office.
John Roberts hardly ever makes mistakes, but during President Obama’s inauguration the day before, in front of millions of Americans huddled together on the lawn of the White House and Washington Mall, and hundreds of millions of people watching around the world, Roberts made what was likely the most embarrassing mistake of his life, completely butchering the presidential oath of office. Even though he’d been practicing the oath all morning, and had the words committed to memory, when it came time to swear Barack Obama in as the nation’s forty-fourth president, Roberts fumbled, putting the word “faithfully” out of order of the other words in the oath and then stumbling through the rest of the lines before wrapping it up and congratulating the new president.
Immediately, Fox News jumped on the garbled oath. Hours after the inauguration, talking head Chris Wallace questioned the legitimacy of the president, telling viewers, “We’re wondering here whether or not Barack Obama in fact is the president of the United States,” and then speculating that maybe this is a situation that will ultimately end up “going to the courts.”124 I guess the irony of having Chief Justice John Roberts rule on whether or not he’d legally administered the oath escaped Wallace at the time.
So to quash any Fox News–manufactured controversy from the get-go, the White House legal counsel summoned John Roberts back to the White House the next day to readminister the oath. Roberts obliged, and in front of the fireplace of the Map Room, under the watchful eyes of a portrait of Benjamin Latrobe, the man who oversaw construction of the United States Capitol Building, Barack Obama once again recited the presidential oath of office.
Turns out, the Map Room was the most appropriate place for Roberts and Obama to convene for the constitutionally mandated swearing in, because from that day forward the Economic Royalists, led by John Roberts, would lay siege to the United States and successfully turn our prized democracy into an oligarchy.
That oath would be meaningless because, almost exactly a year later, Barack Obama’s democratic republic would be transformed into a Royalist oligarchy by the Supreme Court.
Roberts Takes the Case
The Economic Royalists knew the final stage of their coup required the clearing away of all impediments to unrestrained corporate participation in electoral politics. As in, if a corporation likes a politician, it can ensure that he or she is elected every time; if it becomes upset with a politician, it can carpet-bomb his or her district with a few million dollars’ worth of ads and politically destroy the candidate. With that power, the Royalists could essentially handpick lawmakers from that point forward. And with the case of Citizens United, John Roberts knew just how to give the Royalists what they wanted.
Forty years after the Powell Memo instructed that the “judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change,” the Royalists held a five-to-four majority on the highest court in the land.
And as the Royalists were expanding their influence in the United States, they had the perfect ally in John Roberts. Whether it was his work as a clerk on federal courts, as a lawyer in the White House under both Reagan and George H. W. Bush, or as a millionaire corporate lawyer, there was a common theme to Roberts’s approach to American law—a theme that was put on steroids when he ascended to the pinnacle of the American legal system.
As Jeffrey Toobin notes in a New Yorker article documenting the rise of John Roberts, entitled “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth chief justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.”
As a US senator, Barack Obama explained his opposition to Roberts’s nomination to the high court, saying on the floor of the Senate, “It is my personal estimation that [Roberts] has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.”125
The data would support then Senator Obama’s fears. In 2013, a study out of the University of Southern California concluded that the current Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts is the most pro-business court since World War II, with the Chamber of Commerce winning nearly 70 percent of the cases it intervened in.126
But no Royalist victory was more significant than that of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
During the bruising primary election season of 2008, a right-wing group put together a ninety-minute hit-job on Hillary Clinton and wanted to run it on TV stations in strategic states. The FEC ruled that advertisements for the “documentary” were actually “campaign ads” and thus fell under the restrictions on campaign spending of the McCain-Feingold Act, so they stopped them from airing. (Corporate contributions to campaigns have been banned repeatedly and in various ways since 1907, when Republican president Teddy Roosevelt pushed through the Tillman Act.)
Citizens United, the right-wing group, took the case to the Supreme Court, with right-wing hit man and former Reagan solicitor general Ted Olson—the man who’d argued Bush’s side of Bush v. Gore—as their lead lawyer. Some newspaper reports have placed John Roberts in Florida during the 2000 election-recount fiasco assisting Olson and the Bush legal team in convincing the Supreme Court to stop the statewide recount. Roberts claims he was just taking a vacation. Either way, a decade after the high court handed George W. Bush, and the Economic Royalists, the presidency in 2000, it would hand the entire institution of American democracy to the Royalists in 2010.