The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

Author:Jeffrey Toobin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Political Ideologies, American Government, Constitutional, Conservatism & Liberalism, Judicial Branch, Political Science, Law
ISBN: 9780385536301
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2012-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

With the inauguration of George W. Bush, the public profile of Citizens United receded. Bossie, who had become president of the group, thought that it needed a niche to distinguish it from the other conservative organizations in Washington. Bossie’s moment of insight came in 2004, when he saw advertisements for Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11. Bossie saw that the documentary was doing a kind of double duty. Fahrenheit 9/11 and the television commercials promoting it were political salvos against the reelection of President Bush as well as a potential source of profit. (Fahrenheit 9/11 earned more than $200 million at the box office.) A nonprofit organization, Citizens United had a total budget of about $12 million a year, and the vast majority of those funds came from donations from individuals. A small portion of contributions—about 1 percent—came from for-profit companies. (This turned out to be important.)

Bossie determined to remake Citizens United into a movie studio, to produce conservative documentaries. The first, Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die, was a direct response to Moore and not especially successful. But Bossie kept making films, and some found an audience. All had conservative themes, and many were narrated by Newt and Callista Gingrich. They included: Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, starring Michele Bachmann; The Gift of Life, against abortion rights (“My mom was raped, and I was almost aborted. My life was spared for a purpose.”); and Rediscovering God in America (“There is no attack on American culture more destructive, and more historically dishonest, than the relentless effort to drive God out of America’s public square.”).

In the period leading up to the 2008 election, the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton was an irresistible subject for Bossie, given his long history opposing her and her husband. In many respects, Hillary: The Movie was typical of the Citizens United oeuvre. It included news footage, spooky music, and a series of interviews with fierce and articulate partisans. (“She’s driven by the power, she’s driven to get the power, that is the driving force in her life,” said Bay Buchanan, the activist and sister of Patrick, the onetime presidential candidate. “She’s deceitful, she’ll make up any story, lie about anything, as long as it serves her purposes of the moment, and the American people are going to catch on to it,” added Dick Morris. “ ‘Liar’ is a good one,” said Ann Coulter.) Bossie wanted Hillary: The Movie to come out in late 2007, to tie it to the presidential election in the way that Moore pegged Fahrenheit 9/11 to the previous race. Citizens United offered a cable company $1.2 million to make Hillary available for free to viewers on a technology known as Video On Demand.

Over the years, Bossie had become familiar with federal election law, and he was concerned that his movie would run afoul of the same law that was at issue in the Wisconsin Right to Life case, especially since he planned to run commercials in states holding presidential primaries.

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