I will walk you through it, as you probably don’t know all the relevant facts if you’ve been getting your news from Stephen Colbert.
Under both the text of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and the Federal Election Commission’s interpretations, the act of “speaking critically about a political candidate” was held to a be “campaign contribution in kind” to all possible and actual, present and future opponents of that candidate. Also under the BCRA, corporations and labor unions were blanketly banned from paying for such communications.
Under this doctrine, the FEC barred the scheduled offering over pay-per-view cable of a conservative film critical of Hillary Clinton, as it was funded by Citizens United, a conservative activist group which is incorporated.
Citizens United sued the FEC, and, in 2010, the Supreme Court found that laws blanketly prohibiting political speech from classes of speakers are a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
Now, the spin that the pro-“campaign finance reform” people put on this case was that it
- barred all regulation of campaign funding under the doctrine that ‘money is speech’
- created the doctrine that ‘corporations are people’ to justify itself
Neither of these things are true. In fact, the decision only overruled the attempt by the BRCA and the FEC to treat speech as money as a means to regulate speech under campaign finance laws. Congress is still free to pass just about any restriction it likes on who may donate money to a politician or how much, but has seen fit to decline to do so in favor of caterwauling about Citizens United rightfully upholding the basic principle of free speech.
“Corporate personhood” is, of course, inherent in the entire purpose and definition of forming a corporation, has been a fact of corporation law since corporations have existed, and does not mean that “corporations are people.” In any case, neither the phrase nor the concept even appears in the CU decision at all. The notion that the case “established” a doctrine which in fact has been around for over a century and had absolutely nothing to do with the case was seized upon by comedians who found “corporations are people” an easy target of mockery, leading to widespread confusion over what Citizens United did.
What Citizens United actually did was overturn a law saying that it is illegal to go on television and criticize Hillary Clinton.
What this has to do with the news story is: Since this was a Supreme Court decision, it can only be overturned by another decision or by Constitutional amendment. Since it was a Supreme Court decision protecting the most basic civil liberty of the Bill of Rights, the right to speak freely about political leaders, any amendment overturning the decision must necessarily be a repeal of the First Amendment. Furthermore, no amendment would be required to simply pass a law regulating actual financial donations to candidates; only the “don’t criticize Hillary Clinton” law is at issue here.
Hillary Clinton has announced her intention to raise 2.5 billion dollars to win the Presidency in 2016. Apparently that kind of “campaign finance” does not require “reform,” but the part where it’s legal to say you don’t plan on voting for her does. This is an extremely ominous attitude from a politician who has demonstrated authoritarian tendencies in the past, and it’s impossible for anyone claiming the good name of an ACLU liberal to support it.