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Comment by acgourley | Hacker News Reader

Would it be contradictory to be OK with this argument but against the logic of the Citizens United ruling?

No, I don't think it's contradictory. Money can be speech, but sometimes there are good reasons to restrict free speech. One reason is that money can corrupt the democratic process--which is why the Supreme Court hasn't struck down limits on direct contributions to candidates (but god help us if they do).

Edit: It's a common misconception that Citizens United allowed unlimited campaign contributions to candidates. That's not quite true--it allowed unlimited independent expenditures by corporations, but not unlimited contributions directly to candidates. The Supreme Court held in Buckley (1976) that the limit on direct contributions was a constitutional restriction on free speech because of the government's interest in "the prevention of corruption and the appearance of corruption spawned by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates' positions and on their actions if elected to office." That ruling still stands.

Edit 2: Citizens United didn't hold that corporations are people--that doctrine has been around for a century. It held that because corporations are people, they have the same speech rights as natural persons--namely, to make unlimited independent expenditures.

I find it unfortunate that Citizens United extended the concept of corporate legal personhood espoused by Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern...). I think instead it makes sense to say that corporations are made up of people, and it doesn't make sense to grant a right to individual people but deny them the ability to act as a group in exercising that right. It would have sufficed to rule based on freedom of association: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association#United_...

That is precisely what the court ordered. To wit, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the antidistortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form. "

It's fairly clear throughout the ruling[1] that the Justices are not relying on corporate personhood, but the freedom of association argument. It is a media myth that the case was about 'corporations are people, too!'

[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

> Edit: It's a common misconception that Citizens United allowed unlimited campaign contributions to candidates. That's not quite true--it allowed unlimited independent expenditures by corporations, but not unlimited contributions directly to candidates. The Supreme Court held in Buckley (1976) that the limit on direct contributions was a constitutional restriction on free speech because of the government's interest in "the prevention of corruption and the appearance of corruption spawned by the real or imagined coercive influence of large financial contributions on candidates' positions and on their actions if elected to office." That ruling still stands.

The trouble is that it has the same effect, and creates the same appearance of corruption. Acausal trade is possible; a candidate and their PAC do not have to directly communicate to end up influencing each other's behaviour.

It is contradictory, to the extent that you believe Citizens United was wrong because corporations don't have First Amendment Rights.

Note that the "is money speech" question is a total red herring. Citizens United was about a movie critical of Hilary Clinton. It was as core to the First Amendment as it gets. If anything Citizens United, a non-profit organization that exists for the purpose of promoting political messages, is far more entitled to speech rights than Apple, a for-profit company that has little political involvement.

It wasn't the producing or broadcasting of the movie that was prohibited under the previous campaign finance laws, it was the paying for ads to promote it and the paying to have it aired. The court ruled that Congress could not ban paying for these services because it violated their free speech. So yes, they didn't rule that "money is speech" but they did rule that using money is speech.

> but they did rule that using money [to speak] is speech.

Corrected.

Not necessarily. Obviously this argument requires a corporate right to First Amendment protections. But that doesn't imply that corporations (or anyone) should be able to make unlimited expenditures on electioneering. This brief assumes that corporations are (in some sense) people, but not that they are entitled to put political ads on TV.

Restricting speech and compelling speech are separate concepts, so I don't think it's inherently contradictory.

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