LITTLE ROCK — Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens used his 40 minutes Wednesday evening before a crowd at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock to emphasize his continued dislike of a 2010 majority opinion to which he penned a lengthy dissent.
The 5-4 decision in the case known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate campaign spending. The majority cited the free-speech clause of the First Amendment in finding that the government lacks a legitimate basis to restrict independent campaign expenditures by companies.
Companies had been barred since 1947 from spending their general treasury funds to support or oppose a candidate. The decision gave them the same right to free speech as individuals, freeing them to spend millions on their own campaign advertisements in an effort to sway voters.
Stevens, whose 35 years on the court ended the same year as the opinion, wrote a 90-page dissent that was joined by three other justices.
Stevens’ address Wednesday night was hosted by the Clinton School of Public Service in conjunction with Arkansas Access to Justice and the University of Arkansasat Little Rock W.H. Bowen School of Law. Now 92, Stevens recalled for an audience made up largely of legal professionals how President Barack Obama criticized the Citizens Unitedruling several days later in his State of the Union address.
Obama said then, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century oflaw to open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign companies - to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities.”
The president urged passage of a bill “that helps to right this wrong.”
Stevens, who was nominated to the high court in 1975 by President Gerald Ford, noted that Obama made “accurate observations” in his speech. Offering some examples, he said subsequent decisions have indicated that “the court has clearly had second thoughts,” and he predicted an eventual “crack” in the majority opinion.
Stevens said the high court had a chance to clear up ambiguities in the 2010 ruling a fewmonths ago when it affirmed a three-judge district-court opinion that relied on the Citizens United ruling.
Instead of issuing a written opinion that could have sorted out some potential misunderstandings of the Citizens United case, the court simply affirmed the district-judge panel without comment, Stevens said, clearly frustrated.
“It is now settled, although unexplained, that the identity of some speakers may provide a basis for restricting certain speech,” he said.
After his speech, former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, DArk., arose from the front row.He told Stevens, “You really hit the mark tonight. I have not been able to sleep well since the Citizens United decision has been rendered.”
But Bumpers predicted that “it will take two more presidents to reverse that,” as the makeup of the high court fluctuates.
Bumpers also vowed to do “everything I can ... to make certain that that decision does not stand.”
Stevens recently published a memoir titled Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, but didn’t discuss the book.
A day earlier, he was one of 13 recipients on whom the president bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given by the United States.
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 05/31/2012