The surest way to fight corrupt elections is by publicly financing campaigns. Public financing laws ask candidates to trade away their ability to raise campaign donations — an invitation to quid pro quo corruption — in return for a chunk of public funds that will enable them to run a campaign without outside influence. Uncle Sam funds their campaign so that Phillip Morris (or at least its executives) doesn’t have to.

Today’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, however, could eliminate public financing as a meaningful way to fight corruption — forcing candidates out of public financing and back into the money machine of private donors and constant fundraisers.

Candidates will only agree to accept public financing if it won’t prevent them from running a competitive race. If a state offers only a few thousand dollars in public funds to a candidate whose opponent is backed by tens of millions of corporate dollars, then the non-corporate candidate will have no choice but to raise money on their own. To defend against this problem, Arizona developed a two-tiered public financing system. Candidates receive additional funds if their opponent or corporate interest groups overwhelm them with attack ads, and thus candidates who are determined not to be tainted by the corrupting influence of major donors are not left defenseless.

Arizona Free Enterprise, however, finds this interest in fighting corruption to be entirely uncompelling. As Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion for the Court explains, the real thing America needs to be wary of is big government discouraging wealthy individuals and corporations from saying whatever they want:

[T]he matching funds provision “imposes an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises [his] First Amendment right[s].” Under that provision, “the vigorous exercise of the right to use personal funds to finance campaign speech” leads to “advantages for opponents in the competitive context of electoral politics.”

Once a privately financed candidate has raised or spent more than the State’s initial grant to a publicly financed candidate, each personal dollar spent by the privately financed candidate results in an award of almost one additional dollar to his opponent. That plainly forces the privately financed candidate to “shoulder a special and potentially significant burden” when choosing to exercise his First Amendment right to spend funds on behalf of his candidacy.

So public financing laws can technically remain, but Arizona’s attempt to protect publicly financed candidates from a wave of corporate attack ads is absolutely forbidden. Moreover, because few candidates can know in advance whether the will face an onslaught of hostile corporate ads, most candidates will hedge their bets and avoid the risk of public financing.

Today’s decision is the hard uppercut following Citizens United‘s body blow to American democracy. Without unlimited corporate money in elections, most candidates could afford to take public funds unless their opponent had unusual access to wealth or wealthy donors. In the post-Citizens United America, however, no one is safe from corporate America’s nearly bottomless pool of potential campaign expenditures.

Securities and Exchange Commission regulations make it illegal to “make any untrue statement of a material fact . . . in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.” And, according to a complaint filed by the New York Attorney General’s office, an investment company named Janus did exactly that. Essentially, the complaint maintains, Janus promised its investors that it would prevent any new investors from engaging in a particular kind of price manipulation while secretly entering into agreements permitting that manipulation to occur.

Yet, thanks to the Court’s recent 5-4 decision in Janus Capital Group, Inc. v. First Derivative Traders, Janus and hundreds of other Wall Street firms now effectively enjoy a license to lie.

The license works like this: Janus set up two companies. Janus Investment Fund (JIF), which has no assets other than those owned by investors, and Janus Capital Management (JCM), which makes the investment decisions regarding how JIF’s investors’ money will be invested. At some point during this arrangement, JCM made allegedly false statements that made investing in JIF seem like it was a better idea than it actually turned out to be. So this should have been a slam dunk of a case. The SEC regulation does not allow anyone to “make any untrue statement . . . in connection with the purchase or sale of any security,” and JCM allegedly made an untrue statement in connection with the purchase or sale of a security.

Rather than follow the plain and obvious meaning of this regulatory language, however, Justice Thomas’ majority opinion instead invokes a strange metaphor involving a speechwriter:

For purposes of Rule 10b–5, the maker of a statement is the person or entity with ultimate authority over the statement, including its content and whether and how to communicate it. Without control, a person or entity can merely suggest what to say, not “make” a statement in its own right. One who prepares or publishes a statement on behalf of another is not its maker. And in the ordinary case, attribution within a statement or implicit from surrounding circumstances is strong evidence that a statement was made by—and only by—the party to whom it is attributed. This rule might best be exemplified by the relationship between a speechwriter and a speaker. Even when a speechwriter drafts a speech, the content is entirely within the control of the person who delivers it. And it is the speaker who takes credit—or blame—for what is ultimately said.

This is, to say the least, a very odd understanding of the word “make.” As Justice Breyer explains in dissent, JCM drafted the allegedly false statements and it disseminated them to the public, actions that fall clearly within the ordinary meaning of the word “make.” Simply put, “[t]he English language does not impose upon the word ‘make’ boundaries of the kind the majority finds determinative.”

The practical result of this decision is that investment companies can completely immunize themselves from lawsuits under this SEC regulation simply by adopting Janus’ two-company structure. Under the Court’s decision JIF can still be sued, but since JIF also has no real assets such a lawsuit would be an entirely useless undertaking. Less than three years after Wall Street nearly destroyed our economy through incomprehensible investments and potentially criminal “shitty deals,” the Supreme Court has now given much of Wall Street a license to lie.

No one has benefited more from George W. Bush’s opportunity to appoint two Supreme Court justices than major corporations. In the first five years of the Roberts Court, the Chamber of Commerce’s win rate spiked 15 percent, and one of the Chamber’s top Supreme Court litigators admitted that “[e]xcept for the solicitor general representing the United States, no single entity has more influence on what cases the Supreme Court decides and how it decides them than the National Chamber Litigation Center.”

The Court’s profound empathy for corporate America’s concerns is unfortunate in no small part because wealthy and influential corporations already arrive in court with profound advantages. Wealthy companies hire elite attorneys — and they can hire armies of them — easily outgunning the solo practitioners and small-firm plaintiffs attorneys that most litigants depend on to assert their rights in court. Moreover, because big corporations are frequent litigants, they can act strategically — settling cases that are likely to produce precedents that hurt their bottom line while pressing forward with cases that will shift the law in their direction.

Historically, the law provided several mechanisms designed to level the playing field between Goliath corporations and David plaintiffs, and one of the most important is the class action. Class actions enable many individuals with similar legal claims to join together into a single lawsuit, and it is one of the most important mechanisms to ensure that relatively small dollar claims are actually vindicated in court. If a major corporation cheats a thousand of its workers out of a thousand dollars each, very few of them will decide it is worth the hassle and expense of a major lawsuit, and virtually no lawyer will be willing to take such a low dollar case on a contingency fee basis — meaning that the plaintiffs will have to pay more for legal counsel than they are likely to win in the end. If these thousand workers are able to join together into a class action, however, their million dollar claim suddenly becomes very attractive to top litigators — and the hassle of litigation will be virtually non-existent for most of the plaintiffs.

The single most significant development this term is a pair of 5-4 decisions that will effectively eliminate millions of consumers and workers ability to bring class actions in the future.

The more famous of these cases is also the less important of the two. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Court’s five conservatives stripped more than one million women Walmart employees of their ability to bring a class action alleging systematic gender discrimination, despite widespread evidence that women were treated less favorably then men. As Justice Ginsburg explained in her partial dissent, “[w]omen fill 70 percent of the hourly jobs in the retailer’s stores but make up only ’33 percent of management employees,’” and “the higher one looks in the organization the lower the percentage of women.” (Justice Ginsburg also agreed with the majority that the women could not receive all of the remedies they sought in the court below, but her opinion clearly dissents from the core of the majority’s holding.)

The impact of Wal-Mart, despite the enormous class of women affected by it, will ultimately pale in comparison to the impact of another, much less famous case. In its 5-4 decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the Court permitted corporations to refuse to do business with anyone who does not sign away their right to bring a class action lawsuit. As a result of this decision, Walmart need never worry about a class action again. They can simply tell all of their workers to sign away their rights or they’re fired. Likewise, cell phone companies, banks, credit card companies, nursing homes — indeed, anyone who requires you to sign an agreement before they will do business with you — can completely immunize themselves from class actions simply by adding a few magic words to the agreement.

Sadly, this assault on class actions is part of a much broader effort to tilt the legal playing field even further in favor of the wealthy and the powerful. Historically, the courts used punitive damages to drive up the cost of lawbreaking when ordinary remedies aren’t enough to make a company cease its illegal actions. Beginning in 1996, however, the Supreme Court started imposing constitutional limits on punitives. Moreover, the Supreme Court wholeheartedly embraces an abusive practice known as “forced arbitration,” allowing corporations to force their consumers, workers, and patients to sign away their right to sue the company in a real court — and shunting them into a privatized, corporate-owned arbitration system.

The upshot of all of these decisions is that it matters less and less what laws elected officials enact to protect ordinary Americans. Without class actions, punitive damages, access to real courts and other essential protections, many consumers and workers will be unable to actually enforce these laws.

Over the weekend, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that Justice David Prosser “grabbed fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley around the neck in an argument in her chambers last week, according to at least three knowledgeable sources.” Bradley later confirmed the report:

Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley late Saturday accused fellow Justice David Prosser of putting her in a chokehold during a dispute in her office earlier this month.

“The facts are that I was demanding that he get out of my office and he put his hands around my neck in anger in a chokehold,” Bradley told the Journal Sentinel.

Prosser has made a blanket denial but refuses to discuss the incident. Other anonymous sources are claiming that Prosser grabbed Bradley’s neck in self defense.

In response, Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren has called for the resignation not of Prosser but Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson:

And while I have no idea who is off the wall (Justice Prosser or Justice Walsh or both), I do know one thing, CHIEF JUSTICE SHIRLEY ABRAHAMSON sure is not doing her job to lead the court and to give confidence to the people of Wisconsin. She needs to step aside and let someone else attempt to run that zoo.

Abrahamson is a previous victim on Prosser’s abusive behavior. In March, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Justice David Prosser exploded at Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson behind closed doors, calling her a ‘bitch’ and threatening to ‘destroy’ her.” While Prosser admitted he “probably overreacted,” he also said his outburst was “entirely warranted.” Bradley, Prosser’s latest alleged victim, wrote an email to the other justices complaining of his behavior.