Good luck making, "the current ones see the light." The Federalist Five don't give a fart what the constitution says 'cause it says any damned thing they say it says.
Any amendment had better be well thought out or we're going to be right back where we started by some other convoluted road.

Ah, republican presidents and the gifts that keep on giving. Decades of Supreme evil. Multiple long-waged wars that are so difficult to end when the right-wing chorus is always ready in full throat glory. Weakened and besmirched government agencies that are systematically hamstrung if their function is helping citizens instead of funneling money to the rich. Cutting taxes on those very rich and attempting to starve decent government functioning. Increasing poisons in our environment because businesses do not need to be encumbered by rules and regulations. Oh, golly, I forgot. Sometimes democrats are corrupt or weak. NEVER vote for a democrat.

==Let's not forget that the Supreme Court is a political institution that responds to sufficiently broad and deep expressions of public opinion, as it did previously with many civil rights concerns. We can't wait in hope of more enlightened justices -- we must make the current ones see the light.==

Here is a brief description of my redesign of the Supreme Court of the United States - after more than 10 years of proposal on my websites.

It consists of 21 Justices. They have no appointment for life. They have terms of service for =Y= many years, in a range from =X= to =Z=. The first act of a new Justice after taking the oath is to watch a random event, like Bingo number selection, to produce the ball with the =Y= number of years of his or her service. The point is to introduce predictable unpredictability.

Their selection to serve the bench would not be done by the President. States would make nominations to a continuously seated Electoral College of Law, who would vet them. Survivors would subsequently need to win the same number of electoral college votes as for the Presidency. The People speak.

Why 21 justices? In this model, a computer would randomly choose the judicial panel for a case. Granting cert would include 21 votes on the national importance of the case, to assign courts consisting from 7 to all 21 justices.

Case voting either Thumbs Up or Down would cease and desist. Fuhgeddaboutit. Each Judicial decision would consist of splitting 90 remaining points, after the default assignment of 5 points to each side. There would be a numerical metric for the merits of each argument, for each justice. The initial vote would be anonymous, with no name attached to the vote. Statistical analysis of the vote would be shared with the justices but not the public. If their vote meets the mathematical criteria, case over. But if not, the =in camera= resolution would proceed to a repeat vote, until criterion.

The American people =get what they deserve= in voting for political candidates and allowing the democratic process to be suborned by obscene wealth. The only possible rescue is a Supreme Court insulated from agenda$ by the mathematics of probability in order to reach a Peoples Decision.

This imperfect precis is tabled - for the heck of it - on Common Dreams, 12 January 2012. It is an example of what I mean by THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX. Infinite tweaking of the current SCOTUS system would be a Himalayan waste of time.

Trylon

As nutty as Montana is - and it definitely has more than it's share of nuts - they also don't like outside influence - which this particular case was about.

The date of the original law was 1912 and was a direct battle against the Copper Kings who ran the mines in Butte and Anaconda.

The Copper Kings used to openly buy votes - the result was dead workers, poisoned workers, unsafe working conditions, it would be so much dust and smoke in the air from mining activities that the street lights would go on at noon.

The land is so polluted that mercury still bubbles up from the ground -

And as much as Montana is seen as the conservative state it is - it also has a very Progressive history - electing the first woman to the US congress. Janet Rankin was also the only congressperson to vote against WW1 and WW2. In addition she was a founding member of the ACLU and traveled to India to study under ghandi multiple times beginning in 1947.

alternately, eligibility for SCOTUS justices should be determined by peer-expert committees based on each candidate's legal experience and expertise, which in turn would vote for the Justices. The panel itself would be peer selected by individuals noted by the legal profession for the quality of their legal decisions (i.e., the merits of their decisions, the general acceptance across the legal spectrum, the lack of appellate decisions, etc). Professional peer organizations did not exist in the Founder's day but would go further, IMO, to extricate the selection process from politics, which supposedly is the intent.

"Small businesses increasingly recognize they lose out when large corporations are permitted to translate their wealth into political power that yields tax loopholes, subsidies and other preferential treatment."

This is equally true of large unions who also translate their wealth into political power. They recently spent tens of millions in Wisconsin during the recall campaign, and this enormous level of expenditure also swamps the individual voter, distorts the results, and damages democracy.

In a direct electronic democracy where all the people make the laws, why would we need judges? What better judges than those who made the laws?

Writing as a small business owner in an industry (comic books) dominated by large players whom are not above using their leverage to secure their market dominance (which the buying of the political process via Citizen's United facilitates) and make a difficult proposition nearly impossible; I applaud the bold action of the Montana Supreme Court.

"Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Citizens United also asserted that "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,"........

Too funny! Another WRONG assertion from our Supreme Judiciary.

The corporate-fascist plaintiffs who just lost this MT Supreme Court case are guaranteed to begin appealing MT's decision to federal district/circuit courts, all the way up to the USSC. During these federal court appeals, MT's current Attorney General and many other Amicus Curiae brief-filers will join the fight, as supporting defendants of the MT decision.
This particular case will almost surely get to the USSC, and I think it's also likely that, unless the present USSC's makeup is altered toward a progressive majority by retirements and net-new progressive presidential appointments in the interim, the MT decision will be overturned.
The optimistic view is this: Even assuming this worst legal outcome in the s/t, there may already be enough popular outrage against corporations to render any such USSC decision politically untenable.
I guess we'll see which, soon enough.

Hurrah for Montana !
Does Montana have a good prospect for prevailing in refusing to strike
down it's laws in response to the Supreme Court's Citizens United dictum?
If the U.S. Constitution is let mean what it says, then Montana should prevail.
The United States Constitution as it was originally composed and ratified
in 1787-1789 -- before amendments, statutes and judge-made laws --
did not even require popular elections for selection of presidents. It merely
established a formula for how many electoral votes and electors each state
shall have, and left it to each state to decide how to choose it's electors.
(We may need to lose the electoral voting system.) Nevertheless, a more
important principle to be seen is the following: Each state's input to the
presidential selection process was [and is] established to be a matter for
THAT STATE'S legislation, adjudication and regulation. Furthermore, the
Constitution (tenth amendment) plainly requires that " ... the powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it
to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
The SCOTUS has no damned right to put itself [or the federal government]
in charge of each state's own business. The elections leading to the
selection of the president are essentially STATE elections. Any state has
the right, for example, to prohibit "lectioneers" from standing any closer
than e.g., a hundred feet to the door of the voting place. That would be so
as to prevent partisans from hounding or attempting to bribe voters before
they can get into the votimg place. Does it not make just as much sense
to prevent secretly financed TV advertising campaigns from "pushing the
hot buttons" of prospective voters' attitudes? That is, essentially buying the
election by stirring up some voters' emotions? It's Montanans' business
if they want to encourage calmly reasoned decisions by Montana voters,
and do that by prohibiting corporations' hired advertising campaigns.
Hurrah for Montana !

This is a very late post on this thread that will undoubtedly get lost, but as a native (and current) Montanan, I have to also shout "hurray!" Yeah, there are nuts here and nuts everywhere, also a lot of very independent minded folks that are not predictable Ds or Rs and who greatly mistrust centralized federal power.

Jeanette Rankin, Mike Mansfield, Pat Williams (all from Butte) and the list goes on. Paradoxical to some, who view Montana as some backwater of hillbillyism (not to demean hillbillys). The real world is a lot more complex than stereotypes suggest.

The states need to reassert their power; they have the constitutionally guaranteed right to do so, as do The People.