How do you guys feel about this decision? Although I haven't read the actual decision yet, I can only imagine how the holding is going to destroy any chance this country has of holding fair elections in the future. I don't really know too much about First Amendment law, but I am outraged that the Supreme Court has forfeited our democracy to uphold such an absurd principle. If anyone ever meets a corporation, please let me know.

-- SamHershey? - 02 Feb 2010 Nate,

This is my first responsive post on this site, so I do not know if it will even come up under your topic. In the hope that it does, here is my answer to your open question.

Your comment is aimed entirely against corporations, but you need to remember that the Court's ruling applies not only to corporations, but also to labor unions and not-for-profit organizations. (Citizens United was itself a not-for-profit group.) Labor unions and not-for-profit organizations can be just as self-serving as corporations. Would you have supported the Court's ruling if it had included unions and not-for-profit groups but excluded corporations?

Moreover, I cannot see why the individual members of those groups, in their capacity as private citizens, should be able to fund political advertisements while the corporations that comprise them should not. If a CEO wants to fund an ad campaign with his private wealth, should he be allowed to do so? Why does he lose that right in his public capacity as CEO? As with all decisions CEO's make, he is liable to be removed if his company's shareholders disagree with his judgments. Why should political endorsements be different?

Ultimately, the purpose of groups like unions, not-for-profits, and corporations is to give greater power to their members beyond what they could accomplish individually. Collective bargaining is such a power. The ability to make meaningful political endorsements is another. I do not know why an arbitrary limit should be placed on these groups' vital functions.

-- ArtCavazosJr? - 02 Feb 2010

Sam, I hope you don't mind I moved your comment here so the conversation could flow a bit more smoothly.

In response to Nate, I started reading the Citizens United decision, but of course I gave up and got back to reading for class because the "decision" is hidden in a 183-page PDF you can find here. So like 99.9% of the population my knowledge comes from secondary sources. I doubt few if any of us here at Columbia Law School have actually read the decision. Who would? It's "legal fiction" anyway right? Who has ever met a corporation? But that's not what's wrong with this case. There are all sorts of fictions we accept daily as integral parts of our lives. In fact, I would say that artifice is the defining factor of our culture. Our clothes are synthetic, our food is processed into the unrecognizable lumps of meat/cheese/etc. we buy in shrink-wrapped packages at artificial community pantries called supermarkets, and our entire society is based upon the greatest legal fiction of all, property rights.

So why (and how could we) pick and choose? Which legal (and other) fictions will we choose to recognize and which will we choose to deplore? The answer is obvious, and I believe it's what Sam was getting at (though Nate never mentioned unions or non-profits and it goes to show the dichotomy of our society, and you only see such clear dichotomy in artificial systems) that we will choose to adhere or deplore those fictions depending on whether we like them. On whether we agree with them. Often, on whether we can identify with them.

Personally, I don't want all the political power consolidated in corporate interests. Besides the fact that concentrated decision-making power in any small number of human beings has proven time and again to be disastrous, there's the fact that I'm not part of that group. And I don't want to be. But beyond these two facts, what reason do I have to think that giving corporations the right to pour as much money into the political process as they want is a bad thing? After all as Sam said, "If a CEO wants to fund an ad campaign with his private wealth, should he be allowed to do so? Why does he lose that right in his public capacity as CEO?"

My gut response is to say that we lose all kinds of rights in our public capacity as anything. Anyone who lights up a piece of crinkled paper filled with the wrong sort of plant or goes for a stroll on the wrong patch of land will find out real quick that they lose their rights to do certain things in a public sphere. But I'm going to assume that there is no obvious reason a CEO should not be able to plunder his company's coffers to finance political candidates he feels will benefit him. And I'm going to assume that average CEO tenures aren't less than 8 years and that they actually care about the long-term viability of their companies and the pockets of their shareholders. And I'm going to assume that most shareholders know more than nothing about the political contributions of the companies that their 401k or other retirement plan invested in for them, and I'm going to assume that if they don't agree with those contributions there is some avenue of recourse they could use to do something about it. And if I assume all of these things it is still a bad idea because, like Sam said, the purpose of unions and corporations etc. is to give greater power to their members beyond what they could have accomplished individually. And until the idea of a corporation becomes more than to maximize the wealth of its shareholders (read: squeeze as much output from as little input as possible, using genetic engineering on chickens and corn, exploiting cheap immigrant or out-sourced labor, lending in a predatory fashion, etc.) giving that particular "group of members" greater power is a very bad idea.

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