The topic of #CitizensUnited came up, and since I pulled up this quote, I’ll share it here.
There has been SO MUCH misinformation about what CU actually said, so I always encourage people to read it directly, especially since Kennedy writes with a certain artistry.
Here’s one quote that I always find to capture the essence of its reasoning, showing that it’s all based on individuals associating, not so much corporations:
“[The rich always have access] yet certain disfavored associations of citizens—those that have taken on the corporate [or union] form—are penalized for engaging in the same political speech.
“When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep558/usrep558310/usrep558310.pdf
You’ve misunderstood the argument, as it is not what you’ve framed and then criticized here.
You’re fighting a strawman.
@volkris
Please clarify. What did I miss?
Your quote was "...certain disfavored associations of citizens—those that have taken on the corporate [or union] form—are penalized...". From that I simplified that certain nonhuman entities have certain restrictions in certain scenarios.
@volkris
You then quote "“When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful"
From this, I simplified to those limited restrictions being a ban on that info...and thought control.
Admittedly, I simplified. But what did I mischaracterize?
You mischaracterized regulation of sources as regulation of ideas. They are not the same thing at all.
If the administration removes your, personal, ability to express yourself or my ability to listen to you, I would say that in itself is a problem, and that is what the ruling was ruling against.
The government may not censor you, it may not prevent you from speaking because of who you are.
The ruling was a very very clear that government can regulate campaigning in other ways. It just cannot censor based on identity of the speaker, choosing who is and isn’t allowed to present their perspectives.
@volkris
While I haven't researched in detail, I don't think that's correct. While CU may have been argued as corporate rights to unlimited funding, the original regulation wasn't based on identity (corp or otherwise). It limited anybody from political speech outside the normal campaign contribution limits.
To me, there was never a ban on "speech" (ie funding), just a cap.
@undefined @TCatInReality
I linked to the #CitizensUnited ruling above so that you can read directly from the Court that the case wasn’t about caps or unlimited spending.
Like I said, there has been so much misreporting about this case over the years, leaving people so completely misinformed about what what it was about and what the ruling said.
To quote a one sentence summary from the intro:
“The Government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether.”
So the #SCOTUS outright said government may regulate, and it’s not about caps but about whether the #speech is to be disallowed completely.
@volkris
Thank you for the sourcing.
But that's exactly my point. The CU case was not about banning speech completely. That was the SCOTUS reasoning, but in bad faith.
Defending CU a defense of the the indefensible.
... leading further down the road of oligarchy - government by the few.
Excessive power given to the already powerful - who will undermine our planet and our democracy for personal profit.
So that’s pretty much what I was talking about.
As Kennedy wrote in the CU opinion, a huge motivation for him was taking power away from the already powerful, leveling the playing field.
Again, yes I know there has been so much backwards reporting about the opinion, but if you actually go read the opinion you’ll see just how backwards the reporting has been, and that CU explicitly recognized your concern and was emphatically all about taking down the already powerful.
Whether you think leveling the playing field is good or bad is a separate issue.
@volkris @lymphomation
We now have several years showed ng how CU has only strengthen and enriched the already wealthy.
Those actions speak much louder than whatever you think the opinion said
But we can read CU for ourselves. We don’t need to turn to proxies to figure out what was in the ruling.
You know what speaks loudest about what the opinion said? The opinion.
We don’t have to guess about it. Here it is.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep558/usrep558310/usrep558310.pdf
@volkris @TCatInReality That's like saying, we can read the *putative* mechanistic rationale for a study drug effects, we can ignore the actual effects in people.
No, it’s like saying if you want to know what the opinion said then we can read the opinion.
So it’s the opposite.
If you believe that the wealthy have been enriched lately, alright, what’s the mechanism that made that happen? CU? But if we actually look at what CU said we can see that it debunks the idea of that ruling being the mechanism since it specifically and explicitly works to undermine the influence of the wealthy.
The Citizens United ruling itself is anti-wealthy.
Any proposed mechanism premised on the opposite runs up against the text of the ruling itself, which is public and available for us all to read.
For anyone that cares to, at least.
@volkris @lymphomation
We're saying the gaslighting rationalisations written by an extremist judge are not to be taken at face value.
"Separate but equal" was a SCOTUS opinion for decades too.
Don't be the dog in the room on fire saying " It's fine"
The gaslighting is on the other side, trying to tell us that what we read from the opinion with our own eyes isn’t what’s in the opinion.
Again, if you want to know what’s in the opinion (and I’m not sure you actually do) then we can read the opinion.
All of this theorizing about what might be in the opinion based on indirect observations elsewhere and commentary from outlets around the internet is kind of silly when we can simply read the opinion.
Don’t let them gaslight you. Just read the opinion.
@volkris @lymphomation
Well, that the difference between us then.
What's in the opinion has negligible weight compared to the real world impact.
I choose to believe my eyes and the data. "Here's 176 pages of partisan fantasy" is *not* the compelling argument you think it is. And I don't want to hear any more about it.
Reply with data that the wealthy have not benefits (more than the rest) since CU if you like. But don't bother pushing the opinion.
@volkris @lymphomation @TCatInReality A garbage opinion by a language-abusing elitist doesn't undo the harm done by the ruling.
@MaierAmsden @lymphomation @TCatInReality
What specific language abuse did Kennedy commit?
@volkris @lymphomation @TCatInReality He's portraying the wealthy elite as victims of discrimination, ignoring that they have an outsized advantage that campaign finance laws are trying to *correct - as though not allowing moneyed interests to drown out the will of voters with a firehose of campaign cash is unfair - calling the *correction of a two-tiered system "discrimination." It's elitist DARPO, and it's been rejected by 85% of voters.
@MaierAmsden @volkris @lymphomation
By definition (for some), the rich not being able to do exactly what they want, when they want and how they want IS discrimination.
See also, taxation as theft.
@TCatInReality @MaierAmsden @volkris
That one party promises the wealthy tax avoidance has biased virtually every #news outlet in the US -- those owned by the wealthy.
Primarily the bias "shows itself" in what is not reported or covered insufficiently.
It's Conflict of Interest 101. Fox, of course, being dishonest, continues to feature #climatechange deniers.
@lymphomation @TCatInReality @MaierAmsden
What in the world does Fox have to do with us reading the opinion directly from the Supreme Court’s website?
What are you on about?
@MaierAmsden @lymphomation @TCatInReality
That’s the opposite of what he wrote in the opinion, as he said the rest of us need to be able to fight against the wealthy.
@volkris @MaierAmsden @lymphomation
Arguing that we fight wealth by *removing* financial limits - and using that as a justification to strike down an actual Act of Congress - is a stunningly brazen bad faith argument.
@volkris @lymphomation @TCatInReality Talk is cheap - especially when it's contradicted by action.
Don’t overlook the first half of the quotation that really emphasizes how government proposed to put up roadblocks to people trying trying to engage in the same speech that rich and powerful had either way..
It emphasizes that this wasn’t about censorship of ideas but of individuals, which is squarely aimed at the administration’s position that it would block speech based on the identity of the speaker.
The CU decision also emphatically and explicitly rejected the idea of completely unrestricted 1A freedom of speech. In the ruling the Court upheld restrictions!
@volkris
Thanks for the detail
But I'm pretty sure it wasn't Obama admin's position that the ban was by identity.
@volkris That rationale is pure garbage language abuse. Limiting speech that threatens to steamroll other speech through sheer volume to keep us all on equal footing is not "censorship." It's anti-elitism. And our SCOTUS is nothing if not elitist.
How in the world do you get from the Supreme Court’s position that we should all be allowed to speak truth to power to the idea of steamrolling speech?
The Citizens United decision was fundamentally about the exact opposite, saying that we should all be able to speak up, that we should not leave the speech to the elites.
Kennedy was explicit about this in his writing in the decision.
He specifically said that the elites can already speak, but it’s the rest of us who get our microphones taken away under the rules that were in question here.
@volkris That's 100% backwards. The wealthy elite have a firehose of cash that ordinary citizens *cannot compete with. This ruling willfully protects that unfair advantage.
The ruling says the exact opposite, it says that because the wealthy elite have a fire hose of cash, the rest of us need a way to compete with that, so the ruling is 100% about addressing that issue.
Kennedy is explicit about this in the ruling.
In the ruling he points out that because of that fire hose the rest of us need more ability to compete, so because of that fire hose the government cannot stop us from joining forces and trying to compete against it.
The entire point of the CU decision is to counter the fire hose.
@volkris But it's complete nonsense. Poor voters can "join together" and somehow they'll compete with the wealthy elite who not only "join together," but *also weild massive corporate wealth as well as outsized individual wealth? Setting upper limits and curbing dark money doesn't harm those on the bottom. The idea is laughable.
@volkris
Thanks for this. I hadn't understood this subtlety of #CitizensUnited or why the logic is so flawed.
The argument that gov regulation of speech (eg certain political messages at certain times in certain forums) is fundamentally blocking that speech entirely is just wrong. To then extend this fallacy to thought control, shows just how partisan the logic was.
The CU premise that any non-human entity has the right to completely unrestricted 1A freedom of speech is abhorrent.