Sounding Off:

Re: “That’s Debatable, Jan. 28”:

However regrettable, it is hardly surprising that Congressmen John Campbell and Dana Rohrabacher find the Supreme Court decision regarding campaign finance reform to their liking.

Campbell supports it on a totally false premise that this was intended to bring equity to an imaginary imbalance between unions and corporations.

He is either ill-informed or deliberately misleading. His statement unwittingly exposes his loyalties to big business and not to the fundamentals of a democratic form of government. Rohrabacher, on the other hand is definitely ill-informed with his off-the-wall assertion that corporations are mostly supported by pension funds and so money spent by corporations — domestic and foreign — is somehow equivalent to free speech for the masses. Reminds me of Marie Antoinette and “Let them eat cake.”

Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. testified under oath during their confirmation hearings that they both believed in respecting past Supreme Court rulings and, if appointed, would do so.

In the current case, they went way beyond the narrow pleading of the case before them to deliberately revisit decades old decisions, reaffirmed as late as the early 2000s.

They stooped to a bizarre notion that corporations are people and that money is the equivalent of free speech.

So Citgo (Venezuelan owned) and hundreds of other foreign-owned American Corporations and American subsidiaries of Multi-National Corporations (Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, Australian, Middle Eastern, you name it) can buy into our already-corrupt political system.

This outrageous ruling lowers our political dialogue from the gutter to the cesspool.

This is a another coup d’etat by this rogue Supreme Court.

The first was in 2000 when it improperly intervened in a presidential election. Now, they have taken away the constitutional rights of “We the people” and handed them to corporations.

Nothing short of impeachment proceedings against Roberts and Alito will return power back to the people. For those who revel in this decision as some form of victory for their cause, let them be reminded that hundreds of thousands of our brave fighting forces have been deployed 10,000 miles away for the past eight years with the mantra that “we will fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.”

With one perverse thoughtless decision, this rogue Supreme Court has given license to foreigners — friends and foe — to participate in and have equal sway over our democracy. Campbell and Rohrabacher, we will now have to fight them here, on our own hallowed shores.

JAMSHED DASTUR lives in Newport Beach.