Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano took time out of his busy schedule of promoting 9-11 Truthers and calling for the repeal of the 16th and 17th Amendments to attempt some actual legal analysis on Fox News' Your World. It did not end well.
At issue was $90,500 in contributions from General Motors' political action committee to Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Host Neil Cavuto began the interview by asking Napolitano to comment on the legality of the donations. Napolitano replied:
Lawfully, they can do it. The Supreme Court invalidated an ancient federal statute -- a hundred years old -- that prohibited corporations or groups from contributing in federal campaigns.
Wrong. The Citizens United ruling has absolutely nothing to do with the contributions at hand, which are from GM's PAC. Political action committees have been legally donating to candidates for decades, a fact I was fairly sure was known to everyone working in politics or political journalism. (As an aside, Citizens United did not technically overturn the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates, although it certainly cast that decades-old ban into serious doubt, thereby disturbing a century-old understanding of how the government could limit corporate cash in campaigns.)
Napolitano continued:
But think about it. Who owns 60 percent of General Motors? The taxpayers. So General Motors is using taxpayer dollars to give money to politicians for re-election who voted in favor of buying General Motors stock in the first place.
Wrong again! Napolitano would be correct that “taxpayer dollars” were being sent directly from GM to politicians' re-election funds if the GM corporation were making those contributions. Instead, the donations are coming from GM's PAC, which is funded by direct contributions from individuals (largely GM executives).
Napolitano went on to drop his all-purpose comment for virtually any activity that he doesn't like:
This is about as incestuous and unconstitutional as these things can get.
Is there anything Napolitano doesn't think is unconstitutional?