“This liberal opposition has just got to stop!”
Shouted the furious, put-upon Gop,
“The natural order suffers awful distortions,
Like health reform, gay marriage, safe, legal abortions,
Environmental regs favored by the Lorax,
And, worst of all, rich people asked to pay tax!”
The Gop, you can see, was very distraught,
So he sat, and he thought, and he thought, and he thought.
That’s when the Gop had an idea.
An awful idea.
A wonderful, terrible, rule-changing idea.
“I’ll buy the election!” the Gop gave a shout,
“With unlimited corporate money, we’ll surely win out!”
So he put on his suit, and he went to the Court,
And he made an argument of the following sort:
“This campaign spending, limiting law
Features an unconstitutional flaw.
For each person first has the right to make speeches
To convince America what the right sort of Sneetch is,
And money and speech are one in the same
In this televised, national election game.
Lastly, a corporation’s just a big group of people,
So, if anything, its right to speak should be three-ple.”
Soon the court handed down Citizens United,
And the Gop’s feelings changed from mad to delighted.
He got his list of friends and gave each one a call
“Finally, there’s room for the contributions of all,
Restore Our Future, Freedomworks, Red, White & Blue,
Winning Our Future, Crossroads and GPS, too.”
But then somethings happened the Gop didn’t expect,
Some possibilities his plan had seemed to neglect.
PACs gave money to pols with no chance of winning
Because they were too crazy or had done too much sinning.
The primary pushed Mitt so far to the right
What should have been easy turned into a fight.
And the liberals started their own SuperPACS
To counter and make their own TV attacks.
These groups got donations from the rich and the poor,
So the Gop’s people wouldn’t have quite so much more.
They took Romney’s time as a leader at Bain
And made it a layoff and bankruptcy stain.
Gop’s candidates talked far too much about rape,
Leaving sane women voters rather agape,
and Romney wrote-off half the nation, on tape.
It seemed the Gop was really hurting his chances
With his old-fashioned and economically austere stances.
However much airtime the Gop’s money bought,
There were too many voters who just couldn’t be got.
The Gop faced the election, his big plan’s day,
And he watched the returns with growing dismay.
“They vote without hope! They vote without change!
Unpaid volunteers act irrationally strange!
They brave the weather, the hot and the cold,
To get out the vote of the young and the old.
For nothing, they go out and hold up big signs,
And their voters wait through the extra long lines!”
For a moment, a thought struck the Gop, an idea that was funny
Maybe democracy’s about more than corporate money?
But after a minute, the Gop shook it away,
“Those moochers just want to keep government pay.”
Cultural Literacy and the Law is a humor column written by an anonymous Harvard Law student. The column runs every other Monday.
The views in opinion editorials, columns, and letters do not necessarily reflect the views of The Harvard Law Record.