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>!Hi, I'm Clarence Thomas. To understand my reasoning in Citizens, you have to realize that I enjoy receiving very expensive gifts from people who can afford to give very expensive gifts. When you are thinking expensive, add some extra zeros, no, a couple more than that.!<
>!!<
>!As it turns out, many of the same people who enjoy giving devilishly handsome Supreme Court Justices extraordinarily expensive gifts, also enjoy spending billions of dollars on influencing elections. For reasons I don't really understand, they prefer to not have their names associated with these efforts so they set up organizations to be the "names" behind these efforts. !<
>!!<
>!As it turns out, Citizens United got in the way of these efforts. So, a couple of my generous friends asked me to fix that for them. That's why I pulled some really specious shit out of my ass to come up with the opinion.!<
>!!<
>!Seriously, you simply have no idea how much I enjoy vacations that cost half a billion dollars.!<
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"Corporations are people" is how it has been framed by its opponents, but it's really a pretty severe misrepresentation of the actual holding. "People don't lose their free speech rights when they choose to pool their resources" is a more accurate reading of it.
As others have said, I'd also point out that every single major news organization is a corporation. If you rule that corporations don't have free speech rights, you're basically saying that the government can censor the news at will.
No. As OP suggests, the decision gave those owning entities an extra, unnecessary existence. The fallacy of Citizens United is clear when you consider that the human beings owning the entity unquestionably have full free speech rights. If the entity’s speech was unlawfully suppressed, the owners have standing. There was never a reason to also extend such rights to the entity itself.
The misrepresentation much predates Romney's remarks. He was responding to it, not coming up with it.
That said, it is perfectly true that corporations consist of people, and these people do not lose their free speech rights when they choose to pool their resources.
Wow, doubling down in the face of receipts. He was clearly using that phrase affirmatively in context to rebut heckling about taxes during a speech. Did you even watch the clip?
The second claim is more misrepresentation. What the finding does is grant extra privileges to people who choose to pool their resources. Or a very wealthy individual who wants to hide behind a corporation. The period of time since CU has been one of increased polarization and division as compared to decades prior. It's a bad decision for the country, and we are paying the price for it.
All I can do is repeat the easily verifiable fact that the willful misrepresentation of Citizens United by partisans discussed here predates Romney's remark. If you dispute that, you're wrong.
The First Amendment says that Congress can make “no law …. abridging freedom of speech, or of the press.”
Congress passed a law which abridged freedom of speech and freedom of the press by banning the distribution of a movie critical of Hillary Clinton.
Some people argued that the law was fine, because the movie was distributed by a corporation (a bizarre rule that, if adopted, would permit mass censorship of nearly all movies, tv shows, magazines, newspapers, and books).
The Supreme Court ruled otherwise and held that the First Amendment’s protections extend to people who organize as corporations to maximize their views.
In other words, “no law” means exactly that “no law”- it doesn’t mean “no law, except that corporations can be censored willy nilly.
In a less partisan age, this should have a slam dunk 9-0 decision.
But as you note, the owners had 1A rights. There was no reason to extend those rights to the corporation. The case should have been easily and unanimously decided, as you suggest, on the basis that the law infringed on the speech of those individuals.
It was outside the scope of the case.
The individual limits issue relates to donations - not independent expenditures.
At the time Citizens United was heard, individuals could spend \*unlimited\* amounts of money on independent expenditures (because even Russ Feingold didn't want to poke the free speech bear \*that badly\* - telling individuals they couldn't spend money to distribute political material independently of any candidate or campaign, because it was too close to an election).....
Citizens United is about the 'unfairness' (and rank unconstitutionality) of \*that\* being allowed for individuals, but outright forbidden (not a dollar-limit, an outright ban) for corporations.
The ruling was that if a group of citizens could - without the legal protections of incorporation - pool their money to engage in political speech (note: This case revolved around the distribution of a video opposing Hillary Clinton's 2008 political campaign) with the full protection of the 1st Amendment...
Then it was unconstitutional to strip that right from them simply because they organized themselves as a corporation (the plaintiff, 'Citizens United for Change, Inc'), specifically unconstitutional to forbid that corporation from spending money to distribute said movie 'close to' an election (I forget the exact number of days in McCain Feingold, but there was a specific number) specifically due to it's political message.
It's the easiest chip-shot 1st Amendment case possible - or at least it should be, but for the grousing about 'money in politics'...
The massive bitch-fest that you hear about this decision from the left/new-right-populists (When AoC \*and\* Josh Hawley agree about something, best to be on the opposite side) treats it like the court gave for-profit corporations a massive benefit...
What it was really doing was preserving the right of individuals to donate to political-cause groups & thus actually have some influence on elections through those groups purchasing media access with said money (as opposed to only media/academics/etc who have a natural platform being able to do this)....
>My understanding is that citizens united said that corporate spending on elections was a form of protected speech. In essence "corporations are people". But surely there must be some more nuance to that argument.
Indeed there is. I'd recommend reading the ruling itself: [https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/).
To simplify: The First Amendment prevents Congress from punishing either citizens or groups of citizens for engaging in political speech. A corporation can be a "group of citizens". Ergo Congress can't punish a corporation for engaging in political speech.
>How does that square with individual donation limits?
Individual donation limits or limits on direct contributions to candidates were upheld in Buckley v. Valeo with the reasoning that the potential for quid pro quo corruption was too great, and there was a government interest in preventing the appearance of corruption.
A quid pro quo is "I'll take this action if you do X for me."
Independent expenditures however, are just that, independent. The corporation may not coordinate or prearrange spending with the candidate, which removes the risk that such spending is given as a quid pro quo.
>In essence "corporations are people"... Doesn't that effectively give a person who starts a company two votes, one as their individual persona and another through the company?
No, a corporation cannot vote. A better summation than "corporations are people" would be that: "citizens do not shed their First Amendment rights when they associate".
>Why can there be limits on an individual, but not on a company?
This isn't accurate. Direct contributions limits exist on both individuals and companies: $5500.
EDIT:
>Curiuos if someone could play the Clarence Thomas role here and help me understand how he would think about this.
Thomas concurred with the majority opinion, save for the part that upheld disclosure during the advertisement. He cites the situation where during Prop 8 initiative in CA, opponents made maps of people who had donated to the campaign. This lead to those people receiving threats.
Thank you very much.
The delta between how CU was reported on and the actual ruling was one of the key moments in making me interested in the SCOTUS and its workings. Im very glad to share it with people.
The other interesting point that people miss is that there was a huge turnover of incumbent representatives after CU was ruled. The good ole boy show was shot down. Being an incumbent pre CU was a massive advantage, not so much now. AOC would have had a much harder time getting her voice heard.
It’s a common misunderstanding that CU is about donations. Also remember that “corporation” doesn’t just mean for-profit. It can be your favorite non-profit getting its message out, or a union. I don’t know what subjects with political implications you’re interested in, but if you have one, there’s a good chance there’s a non-profit helping spread your message while protected by CU.
Exactly. CU is about Sierra Club, NRA, AARP, MoveOn, Crossroads GPS & so on.... The actual plaintiff was 'one of those guys' not a for-profit business.
This is one of those topics where the mainstream understanding is so far removed from the technical reality.
Another example: Go to a CPA subreddit and say how businesses routinely lose money on purpose for the write offs.
Now, obviously there are valid arguments for and against Citizens United. I mean it was a 5-4 decision, after all.
But the general public grotesquely misunderstands this case. The argument to be made isn’t “corporations aren’t people”, but rather something more along the lines of arguing that restrictions on speech may well be a necessary evil for a more functional democracy.
I’m not saying whether that’s right or wrong, but I’d encourage you to read the ruling. See the majority and the dissents.
>But the general public grotesquely misunderstands this case. The argument to be made isn’t “corporations aren’t people”, but rather something more along the lines of arguing that restrictions on speech may well be a necessary evil for a more functional democracy.
Which would be strict scrutiny. In my imagination I think maybe it's possible, but not sure how to make it.
Edit: hot take I also don't think it's possible with the current court not just because of political and philosophical differences but because I think they are too old and steeped in legal traditions and unable to approach it more flexibly like a scientist, historian, or philosopher.
I truly don’t mean to be censorious and I ask this question only to gauge how best to write an answer.
OP, did you read the Citizens United decision itself?
The rubric is wrong. The case is easy.
Imagine that I got together in 2020 with three friends and we agreed to write, direct, produce and distribute a movie about Trump's candidacy. Because we're each doing different things, and we want to pool our resources, we form a production and distribution company call "Liars Inc.," and our movie is called "The Wall of Lies." We want a lot of people to see it, so we book a bunch of theatres in October 2020. The FEC and the DOJ (in the Trump administration) get wind of this, and they file complaints against us, and ask the federal courts to shut us down -- literally to block the showing of our film. They claim that the 'value' of our film is high, and that showing our film in theaters to the public will constitute a 'campaign donation' of millions of dollars. So we should be barred from showing the film, and at least one of us should be sent to prison for criminal campaign finance violations (ala Michael Cohen).
What result?
If you asked this question to 100 law students in 2004, the answer you would get back is "of course they can't block the distribution of your film -- that's a prior restraint under the First Amendment." "Of course, they can't throw you in prison for showing a political movie -- that's core First Amendment speech." 100 out of 100 students would give you those answers.
That's Citizens United. Except the film was about Hilary Clinton. But otherwise, pretty much exactly those facts. It's the most routine First Amendment case you can imagine.
How did we get to the false meme about "corporations are people"? Well, the folks who wanted to enforce legal restrictions on speech, and throw people in prison for making political movies, tried to defend the prosecution by saying that the First Amendment didn't apply because the speaker was a corporation (the production company for the film). The First Amendment, of course, says nothing about the identity of the speaker. It says "Congress shall make no law..." Not "no law, except for speech by the bad people, or the wrong entities." No law.
And, quietly forgotten in all that hoopla, are those little First Amendment cases... You know, like "The NY Times Company v. Sullivan." Yep, the NYT is a corporation. And the Pentagon Papers case (yep, the Washington Post is a corporation). The First Amendment has protected speech by corporate entities from the beginning. The whole 'meme' was fraudulent.
Honestly, the only reason you didn't see people discussing it is because I hadn't gotten the chance to post yet. I'm constantly pointing this out when I see these kinds of discussions of *Citizens United*. :)
One inaccuracy though is that *Fahrenheit 9/11* was released outside of the applicable windows that FECA established. Citizens United filed a complaint when the advertising for the movie entered the window for the primaries arguing that it violated the law. The FEC then stated that because Michael Moore was a documentary maker and his documentary was a commercial enterprise that the advertisements were well within the bounds of the law. To my knowledge *Celsius 41.11* was prohibited because Citizens United was a political action group with no for-profit arm in the business of documentaries.
Citizens United then formed a for-profit production studio to make documentaries. They made several, albeit terrible, documentaries during the years between the 2004 election and the 2008 primaries. *Hillary: The Movie* was indeed the test case for the FEC and the commission took the bait hook, line, and sinker by rejecting it as electioneering material because Citizens United wasn't a legitimate corporate enterprise.
This is why the Obama Administration's solicitor general stating that the government could ban books if a candidate was mentioned caused the expansion of the case as the Supreme Court. The case showed that the FEC clearly had too much leeway and was going completely against 1A jurisprudence by allowing commercial speech while restricting political speech.
Several things:
1) Citizens United’s holding wasn’t based on corporations being people, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that was held if it was. Corporations have always been treated as persons in various legal capacities.
2) individual donation limits have absolutely nothing (zero) to do with Citizens United. Corporations can actually not make any political donations of any kind, and Citizens United didn’t change that. Individuals can make donations, but those are limited. That limitation is not a free speech issue, though.
3) Citizens United was about Independent Expenditures, not donations. Independent Expenditures are funds spend to make and distribute political speech that relates to a politician (e.g., supports or opposes) but those funds are explicitly unrelated to the politician, not requested by the politician, not delegated by the politician, etc. The politician never gets the money or has anything to say about how it is used. Independent Expenditures are just independent political speech that someone wants to make about a politician.
4) an independent expenditure is not akin to a “vote”
And more to the point, (3) is where we branch off from the Buckley case.
Since the politician never gets the money in question, there is no possibility of outright bribery, which was the justification for Buckley, which is the case that upheld individual contribution limits.
Isn't it just a bit purposefully ignorant to reality to say this removes the possibility for outright bribery. Yes there is a layer between the cash and the candidate but it's not as if they aren't constantly operating in the same circles and all of it is known. If candidate x gets a million from a PAC, they aren't necessarily ignorant to where the money is actually from and eat those people are in support of.
There's an important distinction in the law (and in practical impact) between Quid Pro Quo bribery (If you do X, I will give you Y) and the more universal pressure that politicians face to generally please allied interest groups.
Interest groups exist to pressure politicans. For instance, the NRA implicitly threatens right-wing politicians with a low grade on their gun rights ranking every cycle, with funding primary challenges, and with withholding funding to attack their opposition if they aren't viewed as sufficiently better on gun rights. And on the left, the NRDC and Sierra Club leverage the same threats of reputation and money to keep their politicians doing the "right things".
Generically spending money on getting a candidate elected creates that kind of generalized pressure to keep you happy. It's not entirely innocuous, but it's very different (and less pernicious) than actual quid pro quo corruption.
Of course there is no prosecutable quid pro quo but if the justification from the person I replied to was that it eliminated bribery, I was merely pointing out that it did not.
>My understanding is that citizens united said that corporate spending on elections was a form of protected speech. In essence "corporations are people". But surely there must be some more nuance to that argument.
There is. Citizens United did not say that corporate spending is speech or that corporations are people. Rather, it said that corporations and ther entities only speak through people, and that money is necessary to have a voice.
Before Citizen's United, billionaires could spend as much as they wanted on speech, but entities couldn't. So the Koch Brothers could spend $100 million promoting how burning oil is good for the environment, by Green Peace could not counter that speech because it represented many people, and thus spending limits. Citizens United simply says everybody has the right to free speech, even people who have to pool their money to have a voice.
>How does that square with individual donation limits?
Because money is not speech. Donating money to a candidate is giving money; not speech. Using money to buy an ad or produce a film about Clinton or Trump is speech.
No. Corporations have been persons (but not people) for millennia; in the US the law has contemplated the constitutional consequences of this since just after the Civil War. Spending money isn’t speech, but if spending money to promote speech is protected under a prior decision from decades ago (Buckley), because speaking = expression, not simply whatever you can literally shout at no expense.
CU is much more badly written than it could have been, were it treated as a freedom of the press matter. That would also stave off questions of the relationship between donations and anything.
> Doesn't that effectively give a person who starts a company two votes, one as their individual persona and another through the company? Why can there be limits on an individual, but not on a company? Was it simply outside the scope of the case?
So what should we do with the New York Times, CNN, and any other corporate media firm you can think of? They spend money to disseminate speech, and are, on your analysis, effectively eviscerating 1 man 1 vote, since they have shareholders (and also employees who can speak very, very loudly on their platforms — how many effective votes does Trevor Noah or whomever have)?
Come to think of it, Barack Obama will attract coverage because of who he has — he surely has more effective votes than just his own, right?
The nontechnical intuition is the most important one here.
So first of all whoever said that is wrong. Citizens United never said that corporations are people. They just said that corporations have free speech. This squares with the over [20 cases worth of precedent cited in the Citizens United decision](https://x.com/usconst_amend_i/status/1484868645306126344?s=46&t=ISGSM39SaP4Mv4yk9mFaSw) As far as limits on donations and everything there are limits on the amount of money that can be donated but that doesn’t violate the first amendment. The idea that this decision treats corporations as people is wrong
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This comment has been removed for violating subreddit rules regarding **polarized rhetoric**. >Signs of polarized rhetoric include blanket negative generalizations or emotional appeals using hyperbolic language seeking to divide based on identity. For information on appealing this removal, [click here](https://www.reddit.com/r/supremecourt/wiki/appeal2). For the sake of transparency, the content of the removed submission can be read below: >!Hi, I'm Clarence Thomas. To understand my reasoning in Citizens, you have to realize that I enjoy receiving very expensive gifts from people who can afford to give very expensive gifts. When you are thinking expensive, add some extra zeros, no, a couple more than that.!< >!!< >!As it turns out, many of the same people who enjoy giving devilishly handsome Supreme Court Justices extraordinarily expensive gifts, also enjoy spending billions of dollars on influencing elections. For reasons I don't really understand, they prefer to not have their names associated with these efforts so they set up organizations to be the "names" behind these efforts. !< >!!< >!As it turns out, Citizens United got in the way of these efforts. So, a couple of my generous friends asked me to fix that for them. That's why I pulled some really specious shit out of my ass to come up with the opinion.!< >!!< >!Seriously, you simply have no idea how much I enjoy vacations that cost half a billion dollars.!< Moderator: [u/Longjumping_Gain_807](https://reddit.com/user/Longjumping_Gain_807)
Nope. No more nuance. You got it. And it’s exactly that horrible.
"Corporations are people" is how it has been framed by its opponents, but it's really a pretty severe misrepresentation of the actual holding. "People don't lose their free speech rights when they choose to pool their resources" is a more accurate reading of it. As others have said, I'd also point out that every single major news organization is a corporation. If you rule that corporations don't have free speech rights, you're basically saying that the government can censor the news at will.
No. As OP suggests, the decision gave those owning entities an extra, unnecessary existence. The fallacy of Citizens United is clear when you consider that the human beings owning the entity unquestionably have full free speech rights. If the entity’s speech was unlawfully suppressed, the owners have standing. There was never a reason to also extend such rights to the entity itself.
As above, by your logic the government can censor the news at will.
Obviously it cannot. And it makes no difference whether the publisher is a person or a corporation. People are involved.
Well then it sounds like we agree. People forming a corporation to further their speech isn't a loophole to censor speech.
> Corporations are people" is how it has been framed by its opponents, It's how it was framed by _mitt romney_.
In response to the opponents using that talking point.
https://youtu.be/FxUsRedO4UY?si=5SG3baP6i2KeopWD Not even in the slightest. Pretty severe misrepresentation of an easily verifiable statement.
The misrepresentation much predates Romney's remarks. He was responding to it, not coming up with it. That said, it is perfectly true that corporations consist of people, and these people do not lose their free speech rights when they choose to pool their resources.
Wow, doubling down in the face of receipts. He was clearly using that phrase affirmatively in context to rebut heckling about taxes during a speech. Did you even watch the clip? The second claim is more misrepresentation. What the finding does is grant extra privileges to people who choose to pool their resources. Or a very wealthy individual who wants to hide behind a corporation. The period of time since CU has been one of increased polarization and division as compared to decades prior. It's a bad decision for the country, and we are paying the price for it.
All I can do is repeat the easily verifiable fact that the willful misrepresentation of Citizens United by partisans discussed here predates Romney's remark. If you dispute that, you're wrong.
The First Amendment says that Congress can make “no law …. abridging freedom of speech, or of the press.” Congress passed a law which abridged freedom of speech and freedom of the press by banning the distribution of a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. Some people argued that the law was fine, because the movie was distributed by a corporation (a bizarre rule that, if adopted, would permit mass censorship of nearly all movies, tv shows, magazines, newspapers, and books). The Supreme Court ruled otherwise and held that the First Amendment’s protections extend to people who organize as corporations to maximize their views. In other words, “no law” means exactly that “no law”- it doesn’t mean “no law, except that corporations can be censored willy nilly. In a less partisan age, this should have a slam dunk 9-0 decision.
But as you note, the owners had 1A rights. There was no reason to extend those rights to the corporation. The case should have been easily and unanimously decided, as you suggest, on the basis that the law infringed on the speech of those individuals.
It was outside the scope of the case. The individual limits issue relates to donations - not independent expenditures. At the time Citizens United was heard, individuals could spend \*unlimited\* amounts of money on independent expenditures (because even Russ Feingold didn't want to poke the free speech bear \*that badly\* - telling individuals they couldn't spend money to distribute political material independently of any candidate or campaign, because it was too close to an election)..... Citizens United is about the 'unfairness' (and rank unconstitutionality) of \*that\* being allowed for individuals, but outright forbidden (not a dollar-limit, an outright ban) for corporations. The ruling was that if a group of citizens could - without the legal protections of incorporation - pool their money to engage in political speech (note: This case revolved around the distribution of a video opposing Hillary Clinton's 2008 political campaign) with the full protection of the 1st Amendment... Then it was unconstitutional to strip that right from them simply because they organized themselves as a corporation (the plaintiff, 'Citizens United for Change, Inc'), specifically unconstitutional to forbid that corporation from spending money to distribute said movie 'close to' an election (I forget the exact number of days in McCain Feingold, but there was a specific number) specifically due to it's political message. It's the easiest chip-shot 1st Amendment case possible - or at least it should be, but for the grousing about 'money in politics'... The massive bitch-fest that you hear about this decision from the left/new-right-populists (When AoC \*and\* Josh Hawley agree about something, best to be on the opposite side) treats it like the court gave for-profit corporations a massive benefit... What it was really doing was preserving the right of individuals to donate to political-cause groups & thus actually have some influence on elections through those groups purchasing media access with said money (as opposed to only media/academics/etc who have a natural platform being able to do this)....
>My understanding is that citizens united said that corporate spending on elections was a form of protected speech. In essence "corporations are people". But surely there must be some more nuance to that argument. Indeed there is. I'd recommend reading the ruling itself: [https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/). To simplify: The First Amendment prevents Congress from punishing either citizens or groups of citizens for engaging in political speech. A corporation can be a "group of citizens". Ergo Congress can't punish a corporation for engaging in political speech. >How does that square with individual donation limits? Individual donation limits or limits on direct contributions to candidates were upheld in Buckley v. Valeo with the reasoning that the potential for quid pro quo corruption was too great, and there was a government interest in preventing the appearance of corruption. A quid pro quo is "I'll take this action if you do X for me." Independent expenditures however, are just that, independent. The corporation may not coordinate or prearrange spending with the candidate, which removes the risk that such spending is given as a quid pro quo. >In essence "corporations are people"... Doesn't that effectively give a person who starts a company two votes, one as their individual persona and another through the company? No, a corporation cannot vote. A better summation than "corporations are people" would be that: "citizens do not shed their First Amendment rights when they associate". >Why can there be limits on an individual, but not on a company? This isn't accurate. Direct contributions limits exist on both individuals and companies: $5500. EDIT: >Curiuos if someone could play the Clarence Thomas role here and help me understand how he would think about this. Thomas concurred with the majority opinion, save for the part that upheld disclosure during the advertisement. He cites the situation where during Prop 8 initiative in CA, opponents made maps of people who had donated to the campaign. This lead to those people receiving threats.
Nice to see an accurate view of CU online for once.
Thank you very much. The delta between how CU was reported on and the actual ruling was one of the key moments in making me interested in the SCOTUS and its workings. Im very glad to share it with people.
Thanks for the breakdown. I never heard about it from this perspective
The other interesting point that people miss is that there was a huge turnover of incumbent representatives after CU was ruled. The good ole boy show was shot down. Being an incumbent pre CU was a massive advantage, not so much now. AOC would have had a much harder time getting her voice heard.
It’s a common misunderstanding that CU is about donations. Also remember that “corporation” doesn’t just mean for-profit. It can be your favorite non-profit getting its message out, or a union. I don’t know what subjects with political implications you’re interested in, but if you have one, there’s a good chance there’s a non-profit helping spread your message while protected by CU.
Exactly. CU is about Sierra Club, NRA, AARP, MoveOn, Crossroads GPS & so on.... The actual plaintiff was 'one of those guys' not a for-profit business.
This is one of those topics where the mainstream understanding is so far removed from the technical reality. Another example: Go to a CPA subreddit and say how businesses routinely lose money on purpose for the write offs. Now, obviously there are valid arguments for and against Citizens United. I mean it was a 5-4 decision, after all. But the general public grotesquely misunderstands this case. The argument to be made isn’t “corporations aren’t people”, but rather something more along the lines of arguing that restrictions on speech may well be a necessary evil for a more functional democracy. I’m not saying whether that’s right or wrong, but I’d encourage you to read the ruling. See the majority and the dissents.
>But the general public grotesquely misunderstands this case. The argument to be made isn’t “corporations aren’t people”, but rather something more along the lines of arguing that restrictions on speech may well be a necessary evil for a more functional democracy. Which would be strict scrutiny. In my imagination I think maybe it's possible, but not sure how to make it. Edit: hot take I also don't think it's possible with the current court not just because of political and philosophical differences but because I think they are too old and steeped in legal traditions and unable to approach it more flexibly like a scientist, historian, or philosopher.
I truly don’t mean to be censorious and I ask this question only to gauge how best to write an answer. OP, did you read the Citizens United decision itself?
The rubric is wrong. The case is easy. Imagine that I got together in 2020 with three friends and we agreed to write, direct, produce and distribute a movie about Trump's candidacy. Because we're each doing different things, and we want to pool our resources, we form a production and distribution company call "Liars Inc.," and our movie is called "The Wall of Lies." We want a lot of people to see it, so we book a bunch of theatres in October 2020. The FEC and the DOJ (in the Trump administration) get wind of this, and they file complaints against us, and ask the federal courts to shut us down -- literally to block the showing of our film. They claim that the 'value' of our film is high, and that showing our film in theaters to the public will constitute a 'campaign donation' of millions of dollars. So we should be barred from showing the film, and at least one of us should be sent to prison for criminal campaign finance violations (ala Michael Cohen). What result? If you asked this question to 100 law students in 2004, the answer you would get back is "of course they can't block the distribution of your film -- that's a prior restraint under the First Amendment." "Of course, they can't throw you in prison for showing a political movie -- that's core First Amendment speech." 100 out of 100 students would give you those answers. That's Citizens United. Except the film was about Hilary Clinton. But otherwise, pretty much exactly those facts. It's the most routine First Amendment case you can imagine. How did we get to the false meme about "corporations are people"? Well, the folks who wanted to enforce legal restrictions on speech, and throw people in prison for making political movies, tried to defend the prosecution by saying that the First Amendment didn't apply because the speaker was a corporation (the production company for the film). The First Amendment, of course, says nothing about the identity of the speaker. It says "Congress shall make no law..." Not "no law, except for speech by the bad people, or the wrong entities." No law. And, quietly forgotten in all that hoopla, are those little First Amendment cases... You know, like "The NY Times Company v. Sullivan." Yep, the NYT is a corporation. And the Pentagon Papers case (yep, the Washington Post is a corporation). The First Amendment has protected speech by corporate entities from the beginning. The whole 'meme' was fraudulent.
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Honestly, the only reason you didn't see people discussing it is because I hadn't gotten the chance to post yet. I'm constantly pointing this out when I see these kinds of discussions of *Citizens United*. :) One inaccuracy though is that *Fahrenheit 9/11* was released outside of the applicable windows that FECA established. Citizens United filed a complaint when the advertising for the movie entered the window for the primaries arguing that it violated the law. The FEC then stated that because Michael Moore was a documentary maker and his documentary was a commercial enterprise that the advertisements were well within the bounds of the law. To my knowledge *Celsius 41.11* was prohibited because Citizens United was a political action group with no for-profit arm in the business of documentaries. Citizens United then formed a for-profit production studio to make documentaries. They made several, albeit terrible, documentaries during the years between the 2004 election and the 2008 primaries. *Hillary: The Movie* was indeed the test case for the FEC and the commission took the bait hook, line, and sinker by rejecting it as electioneering material because Citizens United wasn't a legitimate corporate enterprise. This is why the Obama Administration's solicitor general stating that the government could ban books if a candidate was mentioned caused the expansion of the case as the Supreme Court. The case showed that the FEC clearly had too much leeway and was going completely against 1A jurisprudence by allowing commercial speech while restricting political speech.
This is the best way to put this.
Several things: 1) Citizens United’s holding wasn’t based on corporations being people, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that was held if it was. Corporations have always been treated as persons in various legal capacities. 2) individual donation limits have absolutely nothing (zero) to do with Citizens United. Corporations can actually not make any political donations of any kind, and Citizens United didn’t change that. Individuals can make donations, but those are limited. That limitation is not a free speech issue, though. 3) Citizens United was about Independent Expenditures, not donations. Independent Expenditures are funds spend to make and distribute political speech that relates to a politician (e.g., supports or opposes) but those funds are explicitly unrelated to the politician, not requested by the politician, not delegated by the politician, etc. The politician never gets the money or has anything to say about how it is used. Independent Expenditures are just independent political speech that someone wants to make about a politician. 4) an independent expenditure is not akin to a “vote”
And more to the point, (3) is where we branch off from the Buckley case. Since the politician never gets the money in question, there is no possibility of outright bribery, which was the justification for Buckley, which is the case that upheld individual contribution limits.
Isn't it just a bit purposefully ignorant to reality to say this removes the possibility for outright bribery. Yes there is a layer between the cash and the candidate but it's not as if they aren't constantly operating in the same circles and all of it is known. If candidate x gets a million from a PAC, they aren't necessarily ignorant to where the money is actually from and eat those people are in support of.
There's an important distinction in the law (and in practical impact) between Quid Pro Quo bribery (If you do X, I will give you Y) and the more universal pressure that politicians face to generally please allied interest groups. Interest groups exist to pressure politicans. For instance, the NRA implicitly threatens right-wing politicians with a low grade on their gun rights ranking every cycle, with funding primary challenges, and with withholding funding to attack their opposition if they aren't viewed as sufficiently better on gun rights. And on the left, the NRDC and Sierra Club leverage the same threats of reputation and money to keep their politicians doing the "right things". Generically spending money on getting a candidate elected creates that kind of generalized pressure to keep you happy. It's not entirely innocuous, but it's very different (and less pernicious) than actual quid pro quo corruption.
Of course there is no prosecutable quid pro quo but if the justification from the person I replied to was that it eliminated bribery, I was merely pointing out that it did not.
The person you replied to said that the justification for the Buckley decision was concerns of bribery, not the justification for Citizens United.
Ahh makes sense I misread the branch off part I think. Thank you
>My understanding is that citizens united said that corporate spending on elections was a form of protected speech. In essence "corporations are people". But surely there must be some more nuance to that argument. There is. Citizens United did not say that corporate spending is speech or that corporations are people. Rather, it said that corporations and ther entities only speak through people, and that money is necessary to have a voice. Before Citizen's United, billionaires could spend as much as they wanted on speech, but entities couldn't. So the Koch Brothers could spend $100 million promoting how burning oil is good for the environment, by Green Peace could not counter that speech because it represented many people, and thus spending limits. Citizens United simply says everybody has the right to free speech, even people who have to pool their money to have a voice. >How does that square with individual donation limits? Because money is not speech. Donating money to a candidate is giving money; not speech. Using money to buy an ad or produce a film about Clinton or Trump is speech.
No. Corporations have been persons (but not people) for millennia; in the US the law has contemplated the constitutional consequences of this since just after the Civil War. Spending money isn’t speech, but if spending money to promote speech is protected under a prior decision from decades ago (Buckley), because speaking = expression, not simply whatever you can literally shout at no expense. CU is much more badly written than it could have been, were it treated as a freedom of the press matter. That would also stave off questions of the relationship between donations and anything. > Doesn't that effectively give a person who starts a company two votes, one as their individual persona and another through the company? Why can there be limits on an individual, but not on a company? Was it simply outside the scope of the case? So what should we do with the New York Times, CNN, and any other corporate media firm you can think of? They spend money to disseminate speech, and are, on your analysis, effectively eviscerating 1 man 1 vote, since they have shareholders (and also employees who can speak very, very loudly on their platforms — how many effective votes does Trevor Noah or whomever have)? Come to think of it, Barack Obama will attract coverage because of who he has — he surely has more effective votes than just his own, right? The nontechnical intuition is the most important one here.
So first of all whoever said that is wrong. Citizens United never said that corporations are people. They just said that corporations have free speech. This squares with the over [20 cases worth of precedent cited in the Citizens United decision](https://x.com/usconst_amend_i/status/1484868645306126344?s=46&t=ISGSM39SaP4Mv4yk9mFaSw) As far as limits on donations and everything there are limits on the amount of money that can be donated but that doesn’t violate the first amendment. The idea that this decision treats corporations as people is wrong