A few weeks ago, the people in charge of administering the College Board’s SAT exams reported the average scores for high school seniors who took the test in 2011.

As is the case every year, Georgia students did not do as well as you might hope. For the fifth consecutive year, the average SAT score of the state’s students declined and Georgia ranks below nearly every other state.

Georgia students scored on average 1,445 out of a maximum score of 2,400. That was six points lower than the 2010 score and 55 points lower than the national average. Only two other states – South Carolina and Maine – had lower average scores than Georgia.

The state Department of Education continued the strange little dance it performs every year when Georgia’s low SAT scores are disclosed. It sent out a news release about the SAT scores that doesn’t bother to mention until the second paragraph that oh, by the way, Georgia’s scores were among the lowest in the nation.

At least there has been some improvement in bureaucratic transparency under current school Supt. John Barge. While the departmental news release hides the information about the SAT scores until the second paragraph, the news release distributed in 2010 did not mention the actual SAT scores until the third paragraph. So there’s that.

Georgia’s ranking at the bottom of the SAT barrel has been the case for a long time.

In 2002, when Gov. Roy Barnes was in a heated race for reelection against Sonny Perdue, the SAT scores were released in the middle of the campaign. Georgia’s average score had not increased from the year before and the state ranked 50th in the country.

Perdue blamed it all on Barnes’ push for an education reform program that was highly unpopular with school teachers.

“I just want to call attention to the fact that it’s a shame, I’m ashamed of the record here in Georgia where Roy Barnes’ program, in blaming teachers, has caused us to come in at 50th out of 50 in the United States in education,” Perdue said. “Totally unacceptable.”

“Think about it, we are dead last in the nation in SAT scores,” Perdue said. “If that doesn’t convince you we need to try something new, nothing will.”

Perdue argued that the SAT score was the “gold standard” for judging how good a job a state did in educating its students. “It’s the most standard, objective comparison that we have and citizens know, parents know, educators know that’s the measure we’ll be measured by,” he said.

Perdue defeated Barnes in that election and took over as governor, where he began dismantling much of Barnes’ education reform program. The new governor persuaded the legislature to pass a bill that relaxed the class size restrictions in the Barnes program and allowed schools to go back to larger class sizes. Perdue also signed a series of budgets that cut the state’s formula funding for K-12 education by a combined amount of nearly $3 billion during his two terms. These funding reductions were also known as “austerity cuts.”

How did all of that work out?

During Perdue’s first year in office, Georgia again ranked 50th in average SAT scores. In his second year in office, Georgia actually climbed to 49th place, moving slightly ahead of South Carolina. By Perdue’s third year in office, Georgia had slipped back into a tie with South Carolina for last place.

Even with these low rankings, Georgia’s average SAT scores still improved by three or four points a year. Those modest improvements ended in 2006 when the state’s combined score on the math and verbal sections dropped by three points.

That was the same year a writing section was added to the SAT exam, which at least enabled Georgia to climb to 46th place in the national rankings.

In 2007, the state’s average SAT score declined by five points. The average score dropped by an additional six points in 2008, by six points in 2009, and by seven points in 2010.

Using Perdue’s self-proclaimed “gold standard” of measurement, that would seem to indicate Georgia was not doing a very good job of educating its kids.

Perdue, of course, did not like putting a lot of money into public education, as evidenced by his relish for cutbacks in formula funding.

It is interesting to note that during the period from 1994 to 2001, Georgia’s average SAT score increased by a few points each year under governors – Zell Miller and Roy Barnes – who supported more funding for public education. During Perdue’s final term in office, as those cutbacks in state funding began to sink in, the average SAT score declined each year.

Was that drop in SAT scores a result of funding cutbacks, or was it just a coincidence? In the long run, it really doesn’t matter. A strong majority of Georgia’s voters have made it clear in recent elections that they consider it more important to keep taxes low than to spend additional money on education.

In the 2006 governor’s race, voters had a choice between Perdue, who cut state funding for public education, or a Democrat more amenable to the idea of increased spending on education, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor. The voters elected Perdue by a margin of nearly 20 points.

There was the same clear choice in 2010. Roy Barnes said the state should put more money into education. Nathan Deal opposed extra spending and said he favored giving schools more “flexibility” in how they used existing resources.

Voters again made their preference known, electing Deal by a smaller but still decisive 10-point margin.

Georgia does not spend as much money as other states do on education and you could argue that this low funding has had an impact on student performance as measured by SAT scores. But that is obviously what the voters want.

“I’m doing fine,” Barnes said several times during a telephone interview from his home in Marietta, where he also practices law. “I’ve had some fatigue and all, but I’m doing fine.”

The cancer was discovered last December — after Barnes had run unsuccessfully against Nathan Deal in the governor’s race — when he went for a checkup with his physician. Barnes, 63, underwent five weeks of external radiation treatments starting in January, took two weeks off, then had radioactive seeds implanted as a further precaution.

“It was a little rough, but I only missed two days work,” he said. “Even when having radiation, I’d have it in the morning and go to the office in the afternoon. I’ve had one CT scan and everything was fine.”

He has not lost his trademark sense of humor. “I thought it was a pox put on me by Republicans, but now I’m fighting back,” he joked while talking about his cancer diagnosis. He described himself as currently being “out here in exile, where grandchildren, the law practice, and cows rule.”

While he doesn’t plan to run for any political office again, Barnes is keeping track of political developments at the state and national levels. He took note of the upset victory in a New York congressional election earlier this week by a Democratic candidate who criticized Republican proposals to privatize Medicare.

“It goes to show you there is nothing permanent in politics,” Barnes said. “I don’t think the Democrats are dead yet.”

He predicted that attempts by Republican legislators to enact strict immigration laws in states like Georgia and Arizona would succeed in driving Latinos, the country’s fastest-growing demographic group, into the ranks of the Democratic Party.

“African American voters were given to the Democrats by the Republicans,” Barnes said. “I think the Republicans are about to give Hispanics to the Democrats also.”

Former governor and current practicing attorney Roy Barnes had some pointed things to say, as would be expected, about the ramifications of the historic decision.  He had some experience with the effects of Citizens United in last year’s race for governor, as the Republican Governors Association spent somewhere north of $6.5 million to run waves of TV commercials attacking Barnes for belonging to the same political party as the nation’s first African American president.

RGA was run by Sonny Perdue protege and one-time DUI arrestee Nick Ayers last year.  A hefty portion of RGA’s money came in the form of donations from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media empire.

Here’s the text of an essay Barnes wrote in connection with a panel discussion on Citizens United hosted by the State Bar Association:

In ‘Citizens United’ the Supreme Court was confronted with a simple and a supposedly settled question:  Does a corporation have all of the attributes of a natural person or are there certain attributes applicable only to natural persons? The answer seems obvious.

A Corporation has no soul. It can not repent and be born again even by the most determined Southern Baptist Evangelist. It can not marry, even to a corporation of the opposite sex, much less the same sex. It can not vote. A corporation can not adopt a child or be compelled to pay child support. A corporation can not think or have an opinion. Even the most conservative in our society recognize the difference in corporate and personal existence when they argue a corporation should not pay taxes because it is an artificial creature passing through levied taxes to consumers. The examples are endless. Despite these obvious differences and contrary to a over a hundred years of settled Supreme Court precedent, the Court in Citizens United held that corporations have been pining since the beginning of the Republic to voice its long restrained free speech rights and should be set free to do so. What a crock.

History of Corporate Donations in U.S. Politics

Theodore Roosevelt, in my view one of the great presidents, who couldn’t come close to receiving his party’s nomination in today’s political climate, had the following to say about soulless corporations participating in politics:

“All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be, as far as it went, an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corruption practices acts.”

As a result of President Roosevelt’s urging, in 1907, Congress enacted the Tillman Act, ch. 420, 34 Stat. 864, banning all contributions to federal candidates from corporations and national banks. The states generally followed suit and 44 states have some type of corporate contribution restriction.  In 1925, Congress passed the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, covering general elections only. It strengthened disclosure requirements and increased expenditure limits.

Legislation such as the Hatch Act of 1939, its amendments of 1940, and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 further regulated campaign finance by covering primary elections, barring labor unions from making expenditures or contributions in federal elections, and barring corporations from making expenditures in federal elections (the Tillman Act had previously barred corporations from making contributions).

These regulations and provisions proved largely ineffective for a variety of reasons, principally because they did not provide for a regulatory body to administer the laws. This led to them being largely ignored by candidates, corporations, and labor unions. A candidate could also claim to have no knowledge of spending on his behalf and would not be held liable under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act.

The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 or FECA, along with the 1971 Revenue Act, significantly changed how money was raised and reported in federal elections. Together, they required full reporting of campaign contributions and expenditures. This change alone illustrated how much money went undisclosed prior to 1972. In 1968, U.S. House and Senate candidates reported spending $8.5 million, while in 1972, after passage, U.S. House and Senate candidates reported raising $88.9 million, more than a tenfold increase.

Even though corporate donations were banned, it is impossible to know how much corporate money made its way into federal campaign coffers prior to 1972. The picture becomes a little clearer after the passage of these two pieces of legislation. Not only did it require reporting of all contributions and expenditures, but they also provided for an exception that allowed corporations to donate to political activities. The FECA provided a mechanism whereby corporations and labor unions could set up Political Action Committees (PACs), solicit donations to these PACs, and then use those funds to contribute to federal races.

In the wake of the 1976 Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, the law allowed corporations and unions to set up PACs, pay for the operating expenses, and solicit donations from individuals, parties or other PACs.  PAC donations jumped from $92.6 million in 1978 to $219.9 million in 1998.  By 2006, PAC donations to federal candidates had ballooned to $372.1 million.  It does not require an Ivy League degree to understand the link between corporate giving through PACs and legislation enacted in Congress. It is no great secret that PACs give disproportionately to the members of those committees which regulate the industry or legislate the issues in which those PACs are interested. The one limiting factor on this influence buying, for lack of a better term, is that PACs may only donate up to $5000 to an individual candidate. While certainly a large number to most of us Americans, it pales in comparison to the unlimited amount an individual may spend as an “independent expenditure” advocating a political position, as long as it is not coordinated with a specific candidate’s campaign.

Whereas before this ruling, a corporation could not spend money advocating for any particular candidate within 60 days of a General Election nor within 30 days of a Primary Election, now corporations can spend as much as they want in electioneering communications right up until the day of the election. The Court in essence stated that a corporation, like an individual person, has the unabridged right to the political speech represented by such campaign spending.

Making Sense of the Majority’s Opinion

How then did this activist Court of supposedly restrained judges make such a decision, and does it really matter? The answer to the first question is, “I really don’t know.” The answer to the second is, “yes, most certainly.” While the Supreme Court deserves all deference and their decision is the law of the land, it is hard to imagine a way in which they could have gotten this decision more wrong. Justice Kennedy, writing for the Majority:  “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”  Through a number of pages, Justice Kennedy argues that the corporate form is like an individual in that it is a collection of citizens, and that for Government to restrict corporations from making independent expenditures is just an overreach of federal power, pure and simple.

This argument ignores at least two facts:  1) a corporation is not an individual, in a number of ways realistically and legally, 2) the Corporation has other means to express their political preferences and they are quite good at doing it.

It is interesting that the wing of the High Court that most often likes to quote the Founders’ intentions, did not seem to give much thought to the fact that the Founders in no way envisioned a corporation receiving the protections to speak by spending unlimited amounts of money to support or defeat candidates. An individual with individual thoughts, characteristics, attributes, ambitions, backgrounds, etc, is fundamentally different than a corporation. Any rationale to the contrary does not pass the common sense test. A corporation is completely artificial. It is a creation of man to make it easier, more profitable, and more efficient to make money creating a product or providing a service (for profit corporations) or achieve some social, political, or religious goal (non profit corporations).

Speech is the way one expresses a thought. How does a corporation, something inherently made up of many or several, express one thought? Can it even do such a thing? Some might argue that non-profit corporations such as Citizens United are capable of such monolithic thought that can manifest itself in political speech. However, the same certainly can not be argued about for-profit corporations such as Microsoft or Home Depot. A decision by Corporation X to spend $1 million on an independent expenditure to defeat Candidate A is extremely unlikely to reflect the will of all the shareholders in said corporation. As pointed out above, we do not allow corporations to vote, adopt children, or get married. We do not provide for primary and secondary education, health care, or social security for corporations. If your reaction to pointing out these obvious truths is, “Well of course we don’t, because corporations are not people,” then you have taken the words right out of my mouth.

The Court also ignores the fact that corporations are provided with avenues whereby they can express political speech of all kinds. Corporations are free to set up Political Action Committees through which they can give money to candidates or other PACs, or spend independently with some restrictions. And as the statistics note above, corporations make their presence known quite well through such political speech. Interested corporations and unions are not just a voice when legislation that affects them is under consideration, they are the elephants in the room—and most pieces of legislation passed through Congress reflect that. One only needs to look back one year ago to the debate over health care reform to see this proposition in action. The individual mandate that is being challenged across the country was the specific chip bargained for by the insurance companies in exchange for the elimination of pre-existing conditions as bars to individuals receiving health care coverage. Without the individual mandate, insurance companies argued that the health care reforms would bankrupt their businesses—that to require them to cover more “sick” people without providing them with the “healthy” people to pay premiums, would be unsustainable. It is not surprising in the least that the final bill included such a provision.

There is no shortage of corporate money or influence in politics. Corporations are not a discriminated against minority in need of the government’s protection. Therefore, this is an unneeded, illogical solution to a problem that does not exist. For nearly a century, Americans in the High Court and on main street understood the common sense notion that corporations are not people and do not require the same protections. Yet, in this opinion, the 5-4 Majority held that the specter of the federal government banning books and news broadcasts was enough to justify ignoring stare decisis and the common sense God gave us.

Fear of Federal Government intrusion represented in opinion

How the Court made such a decision that had the effect of writing law is a continuation of the polarization of the political views prevalent today. Through much of our history there has been a healthy debate over the role of government in our society. Even in things we accept as routine today, the building of roads, bridges and other internal infrastructures, there was early debate as to whether such was a role for the federal government. However, at only two other points in history, can we find the hatred towards the federal government as is now expressed in our discourse:  the struggle over the abolition of slavery and a hundred years later, the furnishing of full rights of citizenship to the descendents of those who were once held in bondage. There is a reason the Confederate flag has become once again popular:  it is the symbol of the most radical federal anti-government sentiment in the nation.

What result on our Poiltical Discourse?

Over the life of the Republic the concentration of money in the political process has generally established the Golden Rule in politics — he with the most gold wins and rules. Now, that is not to say everything was rosy and right in the past and everything wrong today. But, what it does mean is that the presence of large amounts of money in political campaigns can distort the outcomes of elections and thwart the will of the public. This is especially true if corporations, creatures created solely for the accumulation of wealth, are allowed without restriction to spend large sums of money to advocate for a narrow special interest.

A good example of how this unfettered power can go awry is in our recent banking crisis. The upshot of this effort was the federal government intervened and supported the financial institutions that were “too large to fail’ while most of the community institutions were allowed die. A reasonable political response to this issue could be that if a bank is too large to fail, it is too large period. But what politician in his or her right mind would advocate such a position when it now considers that the largest of the financial corporations would be funding his opponent without limit or control?

Examples of Independent Expenditures in Modern Campaigning

Bush vs. Kerry ‘04:  Swiftboaters
I have heard many say the American people have an amazing ability to ferret out the truth of an issue and to reach the right decision. That might be true were it not for the state of the modern campaign. Following our same example the large financial institutions would not spend money seeking to convince the public that the policy of saving the large and killing the small was right, but would seek to find some personal weakness of the candidate and hammer on that. The campaign of Senator John Kerry against President George W. Bush is a good example of this tactic. Notwithstanding that John Kerry had gone to Vietnam and fought in a war he did not believe was justified, and President Bush had a less than stellar career in the Texas National Guard, the Swift Boat media attack against Kerry was vicious and called into question the patriotism of the candidate who had actually fired a gun in the conflict. This is how money is used in modern politics — not to discuss the differences in issues and allow one candidate to better do so, but to bring down through negative campaign tactics the other candidate. Remember, in politics many times it is the lesser of two evils who wins elections and money is the grist which makes one more evil than the other. In this same vein I have been found to be the most evil I suppose in several losing campaigns.

Barnes vs. Deal ’10: RGA’s expensive foray into Georgia
During my last run for governor the Republican Governors Association (“RGA”) spent between seven and eight million dollars against me in to do one thing — to make me the greater of two evils. From scorched earth scenes reminiscent of the landscape of Mars to every little issue possible I was portrayed as the worst person on earth. Now, I am not whining. I have a thick skin, and anyway this is the life I have chosen, to paraphrase Hyman Roth from Godfather II. . But, with all of the money being spent against me I did not have the resources to combat the negative attacks. Let me give you one example.

Jobs, of course, were a big issue in the campaign. During the time I was governor, 235,000 were created. I am not saying I was responsible for all of the job creation but my prior record as governor was a much debated subject during the campaign. The RGA began airing television spots saying while I was governor Georgia led the nation in job losses. This was simple not true. During my tenure Georgia was the fourth fastest growing state in the nation and the fastest growing state east of the Rocky Mountains, but in the month after the attacks of September 11, and because Hartsfield-Jackson was shut down during that time, Georgia bounced up as losing the most jobs during that short period of time. Because the resources of the RGA were so much greater we could not respond and at the same time adequately promote our message. Thus the louder voice won. There was no discussion of issues like stem cell research which I favored and Governor Deal did not. There was no discussion of shortening the school year because of budget constraints which I said was off limits and Governor Deal said was not.

Excessive money manipulates the truth and corporations are the greatest bundlers of political money in our system. The fewer restraints in corporate money, the greater chance of manipulation in campaigns.

Decline in in-depth reporting compounds the problems

Money spent on mass media has been much more effective in the last few years because of the lack of in-depth reporting on what the real issues are in campaigns and how the candidates manipulate the truth. We have no investigative reporting in Georgia any more. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, with a once statewide presence and zeal to root out corruption and deflate political myths of political advertising, is no more. We now have Truth-O-Meters, whatever that means. Defining what should be the issues and holding the candidates accountable for their positions on real issues is the mark of a great newspaper, not bio puff pieces properly balanced with every position of each candidate however inane. In fact our largest newspaper does not even endorse candidates, I assume for fear of offending or losing circulation.

Now, there are those who will say “nobody reads the newspaper anyway”, but you miss the point. Independent, aggressive reporting gives independent validity or lack thereof to the claims made by candidates and independent groups. When journalists investigate and ferret out the truth, the candidate whom such reporting favors can use her money to get the message out. With a stamp of veracity of a newspaper, magazine or television news, this serves to balance out the previously unchecked claims of independent groups. The demise of in-depth political reporting and the rise of the gathering great amounts of political money by corporations are ingredients for disaster in the recipe of free government.

Looking Forward

What is the future? Does the Court give us a glimpse of what might be struck down in the future in order that corporations and others might exercise their right to spend money in the name of free speech? I think corporate disclosure, though upheld in Citizens United, is in danger as the majority gave a strong hint of what might be required to strike the disclosure provisions.

Last, Citizens United argues that disclosure requirements can chill donations to an organization by exposing donors to retaliation. Some amici point to recent events in which donors to certain causes were blacklisted, threatened, or otherwise targeted for retaliation . . . The examples cited by amici are cause for concern. Citizens United, however, has offered no evidence that its members may face similar threats or reprisals. To the contrary, Citizens United has been disclosing its donors for years and has identified no instance of harassment or retaliation.
130 S. Ct. at 916

Translated the Court is saying the disclosure issue is not ripe for decision but send us the right case and we are with you.

Citizens United was wrongly decided but it is the law of the land. I believe the result of this decision is more negative attacks, more distortion and more polarization of the American people and the political process. No wonder the rest of the world looks upon us a nation which is ungovernable. But, hope spring eternal and the tenacity of the American people will prevail. At least I hope and pray so.