Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It Read Online Free PDF Page A

Campaign Reform Act (also knownas McCain-Feingold, after its Republican and Democratic sponsors). The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act banned “electioneering” spending by corporations—and only corporations—for or against specific candidates within sixty days of a federal election. The law was intended to prevent corporations from bypassing a longstanding prohibition on corporate political contributions to candidates, passed in 1907.
    The case is called
Citizens United
because a Virginia nonprofit corporation by that name sued the Federal Election Commission to challenge the corporate spending restriction in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Citizens United, the corporation, wished to use its corporate money and donations from for-profit corporations to make and distribute what the Court described as a “feature-length advertisement” against Hillary Clinton, who was running for president when the case began. Further, Citizens United sought to do this within the sixty-day period before an election when the law restricted corporate spending on electioneering activity. According to Citizens United, the law violated the First Amendment right of free speech because it prevented Citizens United, a not-for-profit corporation, from engaging in “electioneering activity” and for-profit corporations from contributing to Citizens United’s electioneering activity.
    Of course, people are free to make a feature-length advertisement attacking a powerful senator running for president, if that’s what people wish to do. Nor is anything wrong with people pooling their money to do the same thing. That’s essential for political participation. People contribute all the time to organizations, associations, political parties, political action committees and other political committees. At first blush, the background to the case seemed to warrant concern about government restrictions on the free ability of people to pool resources to advocate views.
    The Court majority in
Citizens United
was not content to leave the case at first blush. Instead, they saw an opportunity to make new law and to throw out a century of law they thought too restrictive of corporations. In the end, they effectively proclaimed that
all
corporations have a right to spend unlimited money in any American election—federal, state, local, judicial.
    The Supreme Court had rejected this argument only a few years earlier, when Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor were still on the Court. In 2003, in the case of
McCon-nell
v.
Federal Election Commission,
the Court ruled that the very same corporate spending provision in the McCain-Feingold law did
not
violate the First Amendment. In
McConnell,
the Court agreed that Congress may make different election spending rules for corporations than for people. The Court in
McConnell
followed the 1990 case of
Michigan Chamber of Commerce
v.
Austin,
in which another majority of the Court had ruled that corporate money, aggregated with advantages that come from the government, is not the same as people’s money pooled together. Corporate spending in elections can be restricted because government creates the advantages for corporations to make them effective in the economic sphere, and the same advantages pose dangers in the political sphere.
    Now in
Citizens United,
the Court, with the additions of a new chief justice, John Roberts, and a new justice, Samuel Alito, threw out
McConnell
and
Austin.
The
Citizens United
Court said its earlier decisions were wrong. The Court struck down the McCain-Feingold law as a violation of free speech rights and invited billions of corporate dollars into American elections.
    Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion in
Citizens United
for the Court. At first, Justice Kennedy’s opinion sounds like a ringing defense of free speech and American democracy. He writes that the government may not “ban speech.”
Yes!
All “speakers”must be allowed and no “voices” may be