Supreme Court fights boldly to keep the voices of corporations and unions from being drowned out by the voices of actual people

From the NYT:

The Supreme Court threw out a 63-year-old law designed to restrain the influence of big business and unions on elections Thursday, ruling that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress. The decision could drastically alter who gives and gets hundreds of millions of dollars in this year's crucial midterm elections.

By a 5-4 vote, the court overturned two of its own decisions as well as the decades-old law that said companies and labor unions can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to produce and run their own campaign ads. The decision threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.
Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority agreed.

The key change:

The decision's most immediate effect is to permit corporate and union-sponsored political ads to run right up to the moment of an election, and to allow them to call for the election or defeat of a candidate. In presidential elections and in highly contested congressional contests, that could mean a dramatic increase in television advertising competing for time and public attention.

In the long term, corporations, their industry associations and labor unions are free to tap their treasuries to assist candidates, although the spending may not be coordinated with the candidates.

Some might wonder how this is different - worse or better - than the corporate- and union-sponsored PACs that we have right now.  Well, those PACs aren't affected at all by this decision.  PACs can still give money directly to candidates and support them in other ways (while falling under the regulatory guidelines of the FEC) and they can still promote "issue advocacy" campaigns; however, that money has to come voluntarily from employees, members, and other parties.  It can't come directly out of the corporation's or union's treasury.  Now, coprorations and unions can draw from their vast reserves to spend as freely as they please to support or oppose specific candidates. 

Here are a few quotes from key players:

- ''The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach,'' Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion. (Really? Vast?)

- Justice John Paul Stevens said in his dissent, ''The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.'' (True, and one might add that said "integrity" is already pretty weak.)

- ''It's going to be the Wild Wild West,'' said Ben Ginsberg, a Republican attorney who has represented several GOP presidential campaigns. ''If corporations and unions can give unlimited amounts ... it means that the public debate is significantly changed with a lot more voices and it means that the loudest voices are going to be corporations and unions.'' (This would seem like an obvious problem in a government "of the people.")

- Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader who filed the first lawsuit challenging the McCain-Feingold law, praised the court for ''restoring the First Amendment rights'' of corporations and unions. ''By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers,'' McConnell said. (Is he saying that up until now, corporations have been losing?  If that's the case, I'd hate to see what the world looks like when they're winning.)

- Chief Justice John Roberts, in a separate opinion, said that upholding the limits would have restrained ''the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy.'' (That's right, your honor, you can't spell "vibrate public discourse" without "unlimited corporate influence." Thanks for the reminder.)

Perhaps the most repugnant element of this decision is that there wasn't actually a case before the court that required them to answer this issue.  Really, the question was a rather narrow one about whether or not a particularly new type of campaign "message" should fall under FEC regulations.  But some justices wanted to go a little further:

Stevens, in a 90-page opinion that dwarfed Kennedy's, complained that the court majority overreached by throwing out earlier Supreme Court decisions that had not been at issue when this case first came to the court.

''Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law,'' Stevens said.
The case began when a conservative group, Citizens United, made a 90-minute movie that was very critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton as she sought the Democratic presidential nomination. Citizens United wanted to air ads for the anti-Clinton movie and distribute it through video-on-demand services on local cable systems during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.

But federal courts said the movie looked and sounded like a long campaign ad, and therefore should be regulated like one.

The movie was advertised on the Internet, sold on DVD and shown in a few theaters. Campaign regulations do not apply to DVDs, theaters or the Internet.

The court first heard arguments in March, then asked for another round of arguments about whether corporations and unions should be treated differently from individuals when it comes to campaign spending.

I'd be interested to know what some of you lawyers or soon-to-be lawyers think of this.