(EDIT: this is in all likelihood true for every political party everywhere - that in practice not every decision comes down to strict application of some theory - but the American right often makes fairly strong claims to some inherent pureness of principle that cannot be backed up by the facts of their behavior.)

Of course it is. And of course consistency is not the point. Hypocrisy is just good politics. "It's bad when you do but good when we do it" is optimal strategy.

Check out Schmitt for the "friend/enemy distinction" in politics [0]. All political factions plays this game, this is fundamental to democracy [1]. Holding your opponents to standards and principles you yourself don't follow is how you win. And of course speech rules within social media platforms is fundamentally a political issue.

[0] https://youtu.be/0d3aRYlSHDU "The friend-enemy distinction"

[1] https://youtu.be/HqgLlYO4JSo "Carl Schmitt On the Contradiction Between Parliamentarism and Democracy"

This ruling countermands that: the (implicit) right to not be compelled to speak would seemingly no longer apply to corporations or, more accurately, the people within them.

Edit: It's important to note that corporations' rights to moderate their online holdings does not rely on the CU ruling.

A more charitable way to put this: you don't lose your First Amendment rights just because you joined with other people for commercial or other purposes.

You have never lost your First Amendment rights in the context of a corporate venture. Citizens United goes substantially beyond affirming that fact: it establishes a separate notion of 1A personhood for the corporation itself.

Corporations are also entitled to other rights that can be exercised by groups, like not having their property searched without a warrant or seized without just compensation, or their contracts broken. They are presumed innocent in court unless demonstrated guilty.

The actual Citizens in question were getting together (uniting, if you will) to spend money and engage in overtly political speech in a tradition that goes back to Thomas Paine. They used a non-charitable not-for-profit corporation to make and to show a stupid movie about Hillary Clinton. They used a corporation because that’s what you’re supposed to use for things like this and the alternative is sending the money to one private person’s individual bank account and that’s got all sorts of problems. And the court found that was a valid way for the people who contributed to exercise their rights to free speech, because of course it is.

I am also not convinced that use of a personal bank account was a significant problem here, unless you mean in the sense that the FEC (rightfully) prohibits excessive individual contributions.

Assuming it was, however: it stands to reason that everyone (including myself!) would be content with a legal structure where N people can pool their money into a publicly auditable political contributions account. I would happily support a law that makes that easier! But that wasn't the intended goal with CU -- the goal there was to channel extraordinary donations from a very small handful of individuals in a manner not accountable to the public.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32880236

But don’t use your personal bank accounts to run businesses or charities, and don’t let anyone at the business or charities you might some day run do that either. That’s a massive red flag, the IRS will come auditing and looking for money laundering, and besides that there’s just an ocean of ways that can go wrong.

And the mechanism for sharing your account like you want already exists. It is called “incorporation”. That is like 85% of the point, easily. (That and doing things with the money, like entering into contracts or owning property.) You’re reinventing the corporation.

Anyway. The goal of CU was to air a movie (a stupid political hit-piece movie, I wouldn’t watch it, but it’s plenty politics).

A 'foundation' in the Netherlands (where I am from) would serve perfectly. And it seems to make sense to me to bar for-profit organizations from influencing elections because of the inherent conflict.

Hmm. Technically yeah, but corporations tend to gag their own employees more than the government gags corporations. The corporation can say just about anything it wants about politics and faces no repercussions from the government, but if an employee says the wrong thing about politics, they'll be shitcanned very quickly.

I can find another job corporation must have its relationship with the government. Basically choice

That's my point! That's the political financing world as established post-CU.

Too many people think CU was some sort of this-changes-everything moment when it was actually a fairly narrow, technical decision based on prior rulings.

I agree that CU was a culmination of decades of jurisprudence. But that doesn't meaningfully change the fact that it has had a substantial effect on corporate money in politics.

Citizens United affirmed that it was ok for corporations to use corporate funds to make political speech via financial contributions. Not allowing that would not imply that people who work for a corporation have lost their individual first amendment rights.

Companies allow individuals to limit their liability.

Now I'm sure there are people who abuse this, but it also allows good people to not risk their life getting involved in a political process where they could be sued for their personal assets.

Perhaps it would be better if the government created a separate category though to separate regular businesses from political liability protection "businesses".

I'm still not entirely sure that would be for the best though on a practical level. Businesses do advocate for themselves with lots of money but that money also prefers a stable boring economy... meaning without those actors, we might start seeing laws and lawmakers that are crazy on both sides more than we are now.

How can a corporation do any of these without natural persons being actually the ones deciding on and performing these actions? Corporation is, after all, just a form of organization of natural persons, and cannot do anything on its own.

In Citizens United, government argued that the government can ban you from publishing a book, unless you’re completely self funding it: if any corporate funds are used in book publishing process (as they typically are with books where authors are paid royalties, it is likely that no books you ever heard about have been completely self-funded). Are you also supporting this position, that government can suppress your speech if any at any point corporate funds are used?

A corporation is a synthetic legal object: beyond basic restrictions on its form, it's allowed to legislate itself internally according to whatever bylaws and structure it pleases. There is no requirement (and no particular precedent) for them having a democratic structure.

This produces a fundamental tension between the people who comprise the corporation and the decisions that the corporation makes: the corporation can choose to do things that are overwhelmingly unpopular with its employees without significant recourse, since the corporation does not operate according to the will of its members.

In other words: corporations are naturally susceptible to undemocratic power concentrations, where a small number of executives or board members use the financial heft of the corporate body to achieve their personal goals. Allowing those concentrations to then seep into our democratic system is fundamentally corrosive.

> Are you also supporting this position, that government can suppress your speech if any at any point corporate funds are used?

No. I'm not obliged to defend whatever argument the USG's lawyers presented during the particulars of the CU case.

Sure, but it’s still natural persons who are actually making those decisions, no? After all, a “synthetic legal object” cannot actually make any decision. You seem to be conceding that the Citizen United did in fact protect the speech right of natural persons, you just complain about the technical aspects of how this speech act was performed.

> In other words: corporations are naturally susceptible to undemocratic power concentrations, where a small number of executives or board members use the financial heft of the corporate body to achieve their personal goals. Allowing those concentrations to then seep into our democratic system is fundamentally corrosive.

So you are only against Citizens United as applied to big and powerful corporations, but are totally fine with it with less powerful corporations? Say, you totally support the actual plaintiff, the Citizens United organization, in its right to publish the movie that was the subject matter in the case?

Also, given that you seem to believe that the government should be allowed to block speech by powerful corporations, what about speech by powerful and rich individuals? Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

CU does nothing to protect the free expression of individuals; it has markedly diminished the expressive power of individuals in the political sphere in favor of opaque and legally established (rather than natural) entities.

> So you are only against Citizens United as applied to big and powerful corporations, but are totally fine with it with less powerful corporations? Say, you totally support the actual plaintiff, the Citizens United organization, in its right to publish the movie that was the subject matter in the case?

I don't know if this is intentional on your part, but you're dropping a key piece of context: Citizens United (the organization) is a PAC, with extraordinarily wealthy corporate financiers. It's not some kind of scrappy outfit with a handful of unpaid undergraduate interns, and it would not exist independent of the corporate interests that use it as a more palatable front for political influence ("Koch Interests Action Campaign" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, I think).

> Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

Frankly, there should be no private financing of elections at all. But that's not realistic.

Realistically: rich and powerful people have the exact same right to engage in electoral politics as everyone else, and there is no immediately feasible way to stop them from dominating those politics via their wealth and power. What we can do is make those attempts at domination as transparent as possible. Rulings like CU directly stand in the way of electoral transparency.

> (...)

> Citizens United (the organization) is a PAC, with extraordinarily wealthy corporate financiers.

So what is your complaint here, exactly? That wealthy corporate financiers can do everything that Citizens United tried to do, as long as at no point any of the funds pass through any corporation or a non-profit? Seems like you're just trying to make the speech of the wealthy corporate financiers difficult. I don't think people should lose their rights just because they are wealthy.

My "complaint" is about civic integrity and transparency: you are (presumably) a member of the same society as me, so you should have an intuitive (and civically gained) understanding that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Our country is better off when those who engage in our political processes, especially disproportionately, cannot hide behind corporate structures.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-chief-of-staff-in-f...

Here's a structure that I think would be fairly unobjectionable: Citizens United works collectively to raise funds for political causes. Once funds are raised, the money -- in its entirety, minus administrative and other overhead costs -- is distributed to all the employees of Citizens United itself. That money is taxed, as it should be. Then the employees are free to voluntarily choose to contribute that money -- up to individual contribution limits -- to whatever candidates they so choose.

The same should be the case if an ordinary corporation (one that doesn't exist for political purposes) wants to donate to political causes: they should be forced to distribute the sum total of that desired contribution as salary to employees, who could then choose to make (or not make) those contributions.

Obviously there are flaws to this plan, and it needs more scrutiny and fleshing out, but I think it is much more democracy-preserving and -- critically -- transparent than just allowing corporations to act as "people" and fund political campaigns directly, or via shadowy means.

Or on the personal level, I can't actually tell if it's illegal for me to pay you $3000 to sign a contract saying you will donate $2600 to a particular candidate. And if it's legal for me and you do to that, why shouldn't it be legal for a corporate entity to do that at scale?

And it's certainly legal for you to hire me to handle the minutia of donating money to a political candidate.

It is a small handful of natural persons (or corporate board or executive team) deciding for the entire corporation full of people who have zero say that the fruits of their economic output (under the auspices of the corporation) are being used to support a particular political party or candidate.

If we look at individual political campaign contributions, then it's one person deciding that some of their hard-earned cash should go to support a particular candidate or cause. But with a corporate structure, it's five people deciding that the collectively-earned cash of thousands of people should go to support a particular candidate or cause.

To put it another way, an individual campaign contribution is "one person, one vote". A corporate contribution is "one person, many votes".

And no, most people do not have the realistic option to quit their job because they don't agree with the political contributions the executives have decided the company will make.

> Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

Governments already do this: individuals are subject to political campaign contribution limits[0]. This unfortunately gets muddied by PACs and the like, which was the issue at hand in Citizens United.

[0] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

There are many cases of well funded candidates (be they self-funded or funded by small donors) failing to win elections; e.g. Michael Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders on the national stage. Despite tremendous advertising, these candidates were deemed inferior by enough voters to lose.

For precisely the same reason that advertising works: people in general are susceptible to psychological manipulation, subtle or otherwise.

Also, I think that one of our mistakes was to not require limits on the duration of a company (because they used to be shut down once their goal was accomplished?). In comparison, even the richest human has a well-limited lifespan...

It's like speed-limits. You can only drive so fast. Similarly we should limit how many dollars any single person can spend on manipulating public opinion.

With corporations I guess we should divide the amount they spend on political adds by the number of share-holders, and put a limit on that.

Does this apply to all advertising, or just "political" advertising? Is "Enjoy Coca Cola" the acceptable kind of "manipulating public opinion", or the bad kind that is limited? Who draws the distinction?

Is Shell or Exxon allowed to advertise their products? Are they allowed to advertise their products in a positive light? Are there spending limits on their just, like, normal product advertising?

Can I air anti-oil and pro-clean-air advertisements? Are these "political" even if Shell's aren't?

But advertising for who should be elected to run the government is a different ball-game. Why? Because government is not just a product you could refuse to "buy".

Government should represent us. But it should not represent rich people more than anybody else, which is what happens if the rich can choose the government based on political advertising and misinformation.

But that is conservatism though. I can't help but see the whole attempt at renaming it "regressivism" is to avoid "conservatism" from taking the fall when people look at it's outcomes. No one that would be "regressive" today was not a conservative yesterday.

There’s tens if not hundreds of millions of them and same for you guys. We are all stuck together in one polity.

If we are ever going to achieve a synthesis and get back to a healthier place it’s not going to involve the kind of rhetoric you are indulging in here.

As far as synthesis and reconciliation, for a long time I viewed the answer as that of respecting individual liberty. Each party seems to get its constituents excited about a desire for individual freedoms on topics that matter to them, and then transmutes that energy into enacting authoritarian regulations that benefit their commercial sponsors. I had hoped that over time the liberty would be an attractor that gained ever more ground. But the flare up of grassroots authoritarianism, specifically in the Republican party where it has gone mainstream, has shown this was too optimistic. So I'm left hoping that there are enough actual conservatives horrified by these developments that will end up voting for the actually conservative options (which now seems to be mostly in the Democratic party) to keep the off the rails reactionary populism from causing too much damage.

Wow that took a turn to a hot take really fast. You don't find the rise of the green left, the authoritarian self-described socialists like "The Squad", etc to be the equivalent on the left? Or do you only view things through the lens of the party you like? Yes, the green energy, banning ICE, defunding police, anti-liberty left is just as bad as the deep right wing that wants to ban abortion and all the other things they do. There's no question and there is no ambiguity. Both want control of what you do in nearly every aspect of your life. Waking up involves realizing both of the extremes (left and right) would happily put you against the wall.

Extremism begets extremism. Authoritarianism begets authoritarianism. The horseshoe theory of politics has reached its peak in the last 6 years and opinions like this are part of the reason why. It's always "Them". Never "Us". If only "They" could wake up they'd finally love "Our" version of big brother.

How exhausting it must be to constantly find a way to simplify a vast group of people down into the absolute edge cases and judge them entirely on that edge case.

These are not positions of the mainstream Democratic party. The Democratic party is still basically constrained to its traditional function of channeling constituents frustration into boring status-quo corporate-first policies, much to the chagrin of people who do support the things you've listed.

> green energy

I don't know how you're saying green energy is authoritarian. If it's the economic meddling with subsidies, I'd say it's disingenuous to focus on that when fossil fuels, and overproduction in general, have been so heavily subsidized. I'd much rather the government did not print trillions of dollars and give it away as corporate welfare, but if it's going to, I'd rather it go to forward thinking technologies rather than just lining the pockets of existing industries.

> It's always "Them". Never "Us". If only "They" could wake up they'd finally love "Our" version of big brother.

I'm not an "our". I routinely get into arguments with Democratic friends advocating bureaucracy-centric corporate-first policies that their politicians have convinced them are genuine attempts at reform. I've read plenty of reactionary writing and think it has fantastic critiques about the Cathedral and the deep state. I think those structures are ultimately at odds with personal liberty and enlightenment. However this does not mean that I view every attempt to attack those structures as a good thing.

While constituents, we the people, agree on most points like personal freedom, individuality, respect of human life, and liberty etc., politicians of both parties, out of necessity, must paint their opponents as the authoritarian regime, set on revoking personal freedom and individuality, and devaluing human life.

If you dislike either party, it's not because one is more authoritarian than the other. It's because we lack the mental capacity to retain all the information that makes up the world around us, and must therefore make easier to process, generalizations to survive; Republican, Democrat, grassroots, mainstream, Black, Hispanic, White, etc. And it's obviously no secret that this necessity to generalize is very much exploitable.

What you don't like about the Republican party is all the things that are also the Democratic party, but only in a generalized view that the opposing parties' electorate has succeeded to exploit in your mind.

The only 'generalized view' is the one being created by Republicans, which I see pushed by Republicans and supported by Republicans. You don't have to look far to see some of the dreadful things they're pushing, and trying to pretend both sides are equally bad is not only intellectually dishonest but it's also argumentally lazy.

Generalizing by nature requires the ignorance of certain truths or anecdotes, in favor of others in order to simplify and conceptualize complex ideas about the world around us.

Read that again. Generalizing requires ignorance.

When you generalize, which you just did, you are, if only by definition, wrong. You must be, logically. If you need help gaining some understanding of logic systems, I'm happy to oblige, because I'm not "argumentally" lazy. (That's not a real word by the way.)

Not all Democrats make up words. Not all Republicans hire bounty hunters.

In summary, when you generalize people as a group to be of a particular belief or characteristic, you must by definition ignore the vast majority of ideas that are intrinsic to the humanity and individuality within the group. That is dehumanizing; it's factually wrong, and it's frankly immoral.

You're effectively taking the stance that you cannot ever criticize a political party for its actions because some small portion of its constituents may disagree which is like I mentioned before, the easy way out. It's avoiding arguing against the actual critique in favor of moving the argument somewhere entirely different.

Let's assume you voted Democrat sometime before 2018.

SC Justice Kennedy, a Republican made it illegal to prosecute gays for sodomy.

Kennedy was on the bench so if you voted Democrat, I guess you're anti-gay, you sick bastard! (Me too apparently! Since I did.)

Sure, Democrats are fighting for civil liberties, right? Unless you want to talk about how they are actually anti-gay, and opposed Trump's rules that federally prevent discriminating cross dressers at work. Didn't hear about that one? Well, that might be because you're busy listening to Democrat politicians YELLING SO LOUD about how they are pro gay rights. Pro civil rights. While they go sit in Congress and vote, just like everyone else, for the corporation who gave them the biggest campaign contribution. Check for yourself at Congress.gov what your Democrat politicians are voting for. Should we brand you with all of those horrible things they voted for like Intuit's grip on the complexities of the tax system? It's your fault taxes are hard to file, I guess! Surely that's a Democratic ideal! I blame you! I should, right? Isn't that what you're saying? That we blame you for your politicians?

And if anything I just said about you isn't true, well, it's just a generalization, isn't it? So by your philosophy, I'm right. Whether you're anti gay or not, you aren't an individual so you don't actually have any opinion except what the Democratic party says your opinion is when they vote in Congress. You are anti-gay now and I don't care how much you want to defend yourself you can't because you voted Democrat. You're a gay hater bro. That's that. That's just who you are.

At least by your philosophy.

Which I very clearly disagree with.

Politics is so full of contradictions, that you can't simply take an inversion and use it to argue much of anything. I'm sure you could come up with a good example to illustrate the individual-vs-collective distinction, but this isn't it.

Also at a certain point the policies of the collective do matter, especially when people choose to label themselves as being members of a specific party/movement/etc, rather than merely voting for a politician carrying those labels as a least worst option.

You've thrown out "effort to prevent people from saying that which is undesirable" as an example of Democratic authoritarianism. However, this is not a mainstream grassroots view. Rather it's the status quo agglomeration of power by politicians, the government grabbing power while entrenching the big tech oligopoly. Democratic voters in general don't seem to be sitting around going "Biden is going to shut those deplorables up", rather it's more like lament and resignation when the topic of social media censorship does come up.

We can of course point to authoritarian policies enacted by politicians from both parties, because politicians are inherently authoritarian, and enacting authoritarian policies that enrich their sponsors is their bread and butter.

However, the cults of personalities around Republican politicians, the rejection of intellectualism, overtly excepting politicians from the rule of law. These all indicate an authoritarian-flavored organizational structure, supported by the grassroots. If fronting as a strongman and pulling stupid stunts didn't work to get votes and donations, Republican politicians wouldn't do it. And the recent state level pushes to prohibit fundamental medical care (ie straight up individual liberty-destroying dark ages authoritarianism) is policy that doesn't enrich any corporate sponsors (as legislation usually must), but rather seems to be completely at the behest of their perceived constituents.

And so, I no longer consider the two parties symmetric. The Republicans have seemingly made their mainstream platform to dismantle our institutions in favor of regressing to some sort of good-old-days theocracy, while the Democrats still basically represent the corporate/bureaucratic status quo. And while I find that status quo repugnant from a position of wanting to reform it in favor of individual liberty, I'd much rather have the imperfect institutions we've come to take for granted, like the rule of law, than have them destroyed from the top down.

For me, the off ramp for my benefit of the doubt was the Republican's Covid response, where political nonsense came up against cold hard non-mediated reality. Let's hamstring federal departments precisely when we need them, 2+2=5, don't bother wearing a respirator to protect your family it's all made up anyhow, all merely to feed egos large and small. The fact the party and its constituents continue to double down on an a President that overtly damaged our country are at least two pillars of fascism - party over country, and cult of personality.

And sure, we can apply similar judgements to help us critique the Democratic party. But there is a stark difference in degree and effect, and it's utterly foolish to ignore that.

However, that would mean a ton of lawsuits for all the defamation and harassment that happens on those platforms.

The idea that corporations were given First Amendment rights by a recent Supreme Court decision that made them people is very frustrating to me. Corporations were deemed "people" in 1882, in San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road, but it doesn't matter even slightly what they are with regards to the First Amendment, which doesn't specify who is speaking. Whether you're a citizen, noncitizen, undocumented immigrant, visitor, or soulless capitalist entity, if you can speak, Congress shall make no law.

Citizens United isn’t directly on point. That was a question of positive corporate speech while this law, if it’s struck down will be struck down under the corporate compelled speech doctrine. But they are both part of the same body of Constitutional law that the federal courts very much have jurisdiction to enforce.

That's unlikely, as such an argument is a complete non-starter.

If I were arguing against the law, I suspect (shooting from the hip without researching it) that the most fruitful line of reasoning would be that the federal government has preempted the field of interstate communications transmission by a combination of the FCC's organic statute and the CDA. This is a better argument because, despite what some on HN believe, there is a half-century of Supreme Court precedent that compelled hosting is not compelled speech, and because of the doctrine of constitutional avoidance.

As an interesting aside, Justice Kagan had some involvement in one of the issues underlying one of the cornerstone cases in this area. Though she was not a party and does not appear to have been among the amici, when she was Dean of Harvard Law School she opposed military recruiting on campus due to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. The Solomon Amendment required non-discrimination in hosting speakers for recruiting purposes, under threat of the loss of federal funding. That compelled hosting was challenged and upheld in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, 390 F. 3d 219 (2006).

I ask because there are so many examples of compelled speech that have not been struck down. Witnesses are required to testify. Various companies are required to print warning labels, nutrition facts, country of origin, and such on their products. Politicians are required to say "I approve this message" in advertisements. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are required to describe side effects of medications. Police are required to give Miranda warnings. Professors at many state universities are required to add a few paragraphs of mandatory text to their syllabi, including a notice that they are mandatory reporters who are compelled to tell the government what they know about certain events.

It's so common that I wonder (despite frequent claims in these discussions) whether a prohibition against compelled speech actually exists at all.

The Court tends to defer to history as a way of understanding how the framers viewed an issue so things like compelled testimony would likely be safe. My pet thought experiment is challenging the requirement to answer the census, particularly with it's much-expanded survey questions. Perhaps I can be compelled to say where I live and who lives with me, but can I be compelled to answer questions like whether any of us are gay?

"Because the First Amendment would not prevent Congress from directly imposing the ... access requirement, the statute does not place an unconstitutional condition on the receipt of federal funds." (emphasis added). Rumsfeld v. FAIR, 547 U.S. 47 (2006).*

I'm not sure where you're getting the argument that this is inapplicable, but it sounds like some of the talking points coming from the Internet outrage machine (e.g., the OP). I strongly encourage you to read the primary sources.

* This is the correct citation. The one I entered yesterday is no longer editable but refers to the Third Circuit case preceding the Supreme Court case; switching tabs on my phone is a little harder to keep track of than on my computer, and I apologize.

Believe it or not you aren’t the first person on the internet that went to law school. Granted most of us have come to regret it …

Wiki