the gop at work

The Republican Party's willingness to break laws and bend their own alleged principals in the service of its corporate masters is pretty well known. Scott Horton at Harper's has an outstanding story that he began yesterday about an example of this in Mississippi.

Basically, it boils down to this: the American Chamber of Commerce decided it was tired of its corporate members having to defend themselves from lawsuits where, horrors, they occasionally had to pay out for damages and malfeasance. So in 2002 they targeted a bunch of (Democratic) Attorneys General in various states, including Mississippi, and sent big bucks for advertising. Mississippi banned the money.

Antonin Scalia, who defends states rights except when inconvenient for the Republican Party, blocked the ban because he said the money constituted free speech. Mississippi lawyers and Democrats raised enough money to defeat the Chamber. But one of the people behind this counter-attack, Paul Minor, was prosecuted on trumped-up charges essentially because his money used to block the Chamber and Republicans was NOT free speech.

Keep an eye on Horton's blog for more on this case. It's a parable about today's Republican America, where power and profit (and obeisance to their corporate masters - see Bush's veto of the children's health insurance bill) are the only impulses behind their actions.