Uh-oh, hedge fund managers and Goldman Sachs partners.  Obviously, few of you are evangelical Christians.  So this guy, who wants good markets, has his sights set on you.  But, luckily not on that carried-interest tax-benefit thing y’all get to use, praise the Lord.
So maybe you hedge-fund types can skip church again this Sunday, after all.
– David Brat’s Golden Rule, me, Angry Bear, Jun. 13
I was wrong. The dust is all but settled now, six days after Brat’s highly unexpected defeat of Eric Cantor, and it looks like what defeated Cantor was not that he was too liberal for Tea Party tastes.  It was instead that he was too Establishment-Conservative for a spontaneous, makeshift coalition of Tea Partiers, liberal Democrats (it was an open primary; it was not limited to Republican voters), and others who reject the practice–and the now-formal claim by five Supreme Court justices–that it is necessary and desirable in our constitutional democracy that legislation and other government policy be dictated by those who can afford to buy it.
Call McCutcheon v. FEC the new poll tax. I do.  After all, John Roberts, in a surprising bit of honesty, described it in his opinion for the majority as pretty much that in his opinion in that case earlier this year. “Ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption,†he wrote, quoting Anthony Kennedy’s the Court’s decision in Citizens United, and then explained:
They embody a central feature of democracy—that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.
But Cantor’s constituents–the ones that Roberts says should dictate Cantor’s policy positions and write legislation he proposes–couldn’t vote in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District last week. The district is too far away for them to commute to Wall Street, or to Wichita, KS, or downtown Houston, or Raleigh, NC.  And surprisingly, it turns out that Brat actually ran what was in large part a progressive economic-populist–an anti-plutocracy–campaign highlighting who exactly Cantor’s  constituents (to borrow Roberts’ term) are.  So, now that that is being widely reported and is sinking in, hedge-fund types and the Chamber of Commerce crowd apparently indeed are starting to pray.
Cantor was beaten, in part, by Citizens United and McCutcheon–by a backlash toward the political system that is now, bizarrely but expressly, institutionalized as a matter of constitutional jurisprudence.  Turnout was very heavy, far heavier than it was in the primary in that district two years ago, when apparently all the candidates were fine, thank you very much, with poll-tax democracy.
Actually, even before I wrote my post last Friday I had read an article in the Washington Post by Jia Lynn Yang, titled “Why Cantor’s loss is especially bad news for big business,†detailing Brat’s campaign and challenging the presumption that he won mainly on a  standard-issue far-right anti-immigration, Cantor-is-too-liberal-for-the-Tea-Party platform.  But because his cliche-ridden Ayn Rand, anti-tax, anti-government-regulation positions and loopy justifications for them–which were the subject of most of my Friday post–are, let’s just say, hard to reconcile with such things as, y’know, regulation of banks and hedge funds and objections to the fact of legislation being written by the Koch brothers and the Chamber of Commerce, I figured that the initial analyses were right: Cantor was defeated because he voted to end the government-shutdown and to increase the debt ceiling and wasn’t quite hard-line enough on immigration, and therefore flunked the purity test.
A particularly jarring hallmark of the current Supreme Court majority’s aggressive Movement Conservative restructuring of American law in the image of 1980s Republican Party platforms is these justices’ spontaneous, unsupported declarations of fact upon which they claim to base the rulings.  These are statements of fact for which there is no support in the case record. Facts such as what motivates elected public officeholders, and also facts about people’s opinions, perceptions, conclusions concerning matters such as the effect of huge campaign contributions on the politician-beneficiaries, that are, most people recognize, contrary to actual fact.  Most people who are not a Movement Conservative Supreme Court justice and who are not named the Mad Hatter consider the idea of large campaign contributions in exchange for legislation that they offer the very essence of political corruption in a Democratic system.
