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.
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.
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.