Sparks: US supreme court strikes down limit on spending by political parties in support of candidates

When we describe the purchase of influence as the exercise of speech, the name no longer matches the reality, and the ritual of the ballot becomes a hollow mask for the weight of the treasury.

How long will the highest magistrates permit the gold of the faction to silences the voice of the citizen, until the Republic itself is nothing but a ledger for the highest bidder to balance?

Political machines expand to fill every available vessel of influence, and when the legal barriers to their treasury are dismantled, the historical record guarantees that absolute funding will inevitably lead to absolute corruption.

That a small cabal of managers should wield the concentrated wealth of a party to drown out the unassisted reason of the individual citizen is a subversion of that equal voice which remains the only legitimate foundation of a free state.

The court has concluded that the best way to ensure everyone is heard is to allow a very small number of people to buy all the available air, which is a perfectly logical solution if one considers silence a form of music.

We see here a massive surge of unregulated energy channeled through a single circuit, which will inevitably burn out the delicate relay of the individual voter who lacks the capacity to ground such a high-voltage input.

It is a most enlightened arrangement where the poor are granted the sacred right to remain silent while the rich are given the holy obligation to speak on their behalf at the cost of several million francs.

They spent the afternoon discussing the sanctity of the constitution in the parlor, while in the counting-house, the ink was already drying on the checks that made the entire conversation quite unnecessary.

“Unburdening the democratic process from restrictive boundaries” - note how the nouns have been scrubbed of their price tags so that the transaction may proceed without the vulgar interruption of a receipt.

A physician does not cure a fever by pouring more bile into the patient, yet the court seems convinced that the health of the body politic is best served by increasing the very pressures that have already induced the delirium.

The judges have decided that since money talks, it would be downright un-American to tell it to pipe down once in a while, especially when it has so many expensive things to say to us about our own welfare.