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
@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.