Citizens United v. FEC

A friend asked for my opinion of the recent Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United v. FEC. I thought I might as well post my response here.

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The Supreme Court decision - whether I think it's good or bad - is correct. You'll notice that most criticism of it from the Left focuses on the effect of the decision (Corporations will eat our babies!!!), rather than the constitutional arguments involved. That's because the bill clearly violates the First Amendment by making political speech illegal.

The only argument to the contrary is that freedom of speech is a fundamental right of individuals, but not of corporations. And that's what the dissent tries to argue. But Scalia takes the argument apart in his concurring opinion. You really should read it here, starting at about page 79.

For one thing, he makes the point that if freedom of speech doesn't extend to groups, then neither would freedom of the press - mentioned three words later in the same Amendment. By the dissent's logic, people individually could write and publish whatever they want, but if they join together with others to form a newspaper or magazine - then the Congress can censor them at will. That's clearly wrong. Fundamental rights, if they're worth anything, must exist in both individual and corporate contexts.

Here's how he sums up his argument, and the court's holding:

The dissent says that when the Framers "constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind." That is no doubt true. ... But the individual person’s right to speak includes the right to speak in association with other individual persons. Surely the dissent does not believe that speech by the Republican Party or the Democratic Party can be censored because it is not the speech of “an individual American.” It is the speech of many individual Americans, who have associated in a common cause, giving the leadership of the party the right to speak on their behalf. The association of individuals in a business corporation is no different—or at least it cannot be denied the right to speak on the simplistic ground that it is not “an individual American.”
...
The Amendment is written in terms of “speech,” not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals—and the dissent offers no evidence about the original meaning of the text to support any such exclusion.

So basically, the court rightly overturned a recent precedent to make the law conform to the First Amendment again. And liberals are in the unfortunate position of supporting government censorship of political speech because it would solidify their power. Ouch.