> (...)
> 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.
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.