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.
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.
That's my point! That's the political financing world as established post-CU.
I can find another job corporation must have its relationship with the government. Basically choice
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.
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.