The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.
By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.
It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.
Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority apparently agreed.
"The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.
However, Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting from the main holding, said, "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation."
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens' dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.
The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.
Advocates of strong campaign finance regulations have predicted that a court ruling against the limits would lead to a flood of corporate and union money in federal campaigns as early as this year's midterm congressional elections.
The decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, removes limits on independent expenditures that are not coordinated with candidates' campaigns.
The case also does not affect political action committees, which mushroomed after post-Watergate laws set the first limits on contributions by individuals to candidates. Corporations, unions and others may create PACs to contribute directly to candidates, but they must be funded with voluntary contributions from employees, members and other individuals, not by corporate or union treasuries.
http://www.pottstownmercury.com/articles/2010/01/30/opinion/srv0000007468582.txt
"I hope we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." — Thomas Jefferson, 1816
Thanks in part to the Supreme Court and our diligent friends at Citizens United, the United States has now moved a step closer to formally adopting a "one-dollar, one vote" political system. I've long used the phrase satirically to describe the malign influence of tycoon-funded Washington propaganda shops like Citizens United upon our democracy. In the wake of last week's Supreme Court ruling awarding corporations precisely the same First Amendment rights as individual U.S. citizens, it's not so funny anymore.
Citizens United, and its head honcho, David Bossie, had a hand in virtually every lurid smear of Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich eventually fired him as a congressional investigator for distributing doctored audiotapes falsely implicating Hillary Clinton in wrongdoing. During the 2008 primaries, Bossie helped produce another video attacking then-Sen. Clinton. Citizens United was free to sell it or give it away. Due to its corporate funding, however, the Federal Election Commission ruled that campaign finance laws prohibited its being broadcast as a political commercial.
Five radical-right judicial activists on the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. Brushing aside a century of lawmaking and judicial precedent dating back to Theodore Roosevelt, they ruled that when it comes to political speech, you, I, General Electric, Toyota and Goldman Sachs have exactly the same free speech rights.
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