I didn't have room to go into much detail about the Supreme Court decision mentioned in the cartoon, but the gist of it was that they rejected Vermont's campaign spending law which limited how much a candidate could contribute to his or her own campaign, citing the precedent of Buckley v. Valeo, which conflates money with free speech.

Such dreadful legal precedents are the subject of a book I read a couple years ago called Gangs of America, by Ted Nace. It's a very evenhanded, meticulously-researched history of corporate power in the United States. On the 1976 "money = speech" ruling, Nace writes:

In essence, the Court ruled that since spending money is often necessary to communicate a message to a large audience, restrictions on political spending or donations must satisfy the same difficult standard that speech must satisfy in order to be considered constitutional.

I will let my cartoon speak to the absurdity of that argument. The only way out of our current crisis is 100% public financing of elections, which seems about as likely as me orbiting Pluto in a tutu tonight. (I'll let you know if that happens.)

Beyond the Supreme Court ruling, I think the strip wound up being a nice metaphor for how many aspects of life actually work in this country, including health care, as one reader suggested.

And yes, the cartoon is a not-so-oblique reference to the old Constitutional clause stating slaves counted as 3/5 person. Bear in mind this did not give them voting rights, but allowed them to be counted for the purposes of electoral college representation, so the South had more political clout to keep slavery legal. It's an irony worthy of today's standards!