Here are five questions I'd like to ask the Supreme Court of the United States :
1. How can you expect us to take the law seriously when you so clearly don't?
This is not a frivolous question. You claim to base your rulings on the Constitution, the highest law of the land. Everybody knows you were chosen for your political views, not your prowess as jurists or legal scholars. But once there, you have lifetime tenure. The pressure is off. So why don't you shed your prejudices and try a bit harder to approximate impartial justice?
The senior member of the Court, Antonin Scalia, is a caricature of a judge, a disgrace to the legal profession, and a menace to society. And yet four of you consistently vote with him on crucial questions that determine our fate! That's positively absurd. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
2. Why do you pretend to be impartial when you so obviously let your own political predilections and prejudices get in the way of the truth at every turn?
For example, everybody knows that corporations are not people. Four of you are honest about it. Why do five of you insist on making fools of yourselves and pretending otherwise?
3. If corporations are people by your twisted definition, why aren't people corporations with the same Constitutional rights, legal protections, bailouts, and tax breaks corporations get?
Following the 2008 financial meltdown -- a crisis and job-destroying recession engineered by high-flying investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalists -- the banks got bailed out while many homeowners were faced with foreclosure. TARP shelled out $700 billion of the taxpayers' money. But that was just a drop in the bucket, according to an investigative team at Bloomberg News: --at one point last year the U.S. had lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to rescue the economy."
Also, corporations get all kinds of tax breaks not available to real people. Some of the biggest corporations in America pay no income tax at all. Others pay at a rate middle class tax payers can only envy. If corporations are people, why do ordinary people pay more -- a lot more -- on "earned income" than corporate plutocrats do who pay at the "capital gains" rate of 15% or less. Who was surprised when Mitt ("Corporations are people, my friend") Romney finally admitted that he paid considerably less than 15%?
Meanwhile, corporate income tax which produced as much one-third of total federal revenue in the 1950s now accounts for a mere 10%. During this same time-span, however, corporate assets grew 15 times in 2007 constant dollars, nearly twice as fast as household median income. But personal income taxes paid by the middle class now account for over 45% of total federal revenue, with the remainder coming out of payroll taxes. So, to repeat, why don't you rule that making some people (wage-earners) pay more than other "people" (corporations) is unconstitutional?
4. If you really think corporations are people, why not dogs?
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