Reply #58: The crux of the issue was corruption, and the rest of the opinion was getting to the point where [View All]

they could discuss the crux of the issue.



I'm not inventing anything. I'm merely citing the dividing line on these laws, which has existed since Buckley vs. Valeo articulated the anticorruption rationale in the first place in the 1976. Some speech suppression (such as suppressing contributions above a certain limit, suppressing non-disclosed speech, etc) is completely Constitutional, even after Citizens United. The dividing line is entirely about corruption -- the court decided that contribution bans above a certain limit and disclosure requires are sufficiently tailored to preventing corruption, while expenditure bans above a certain limit are not. Certain types of suppression is allowed, and other types of suppression are not.

Furthermore, you would know this if you have read any of the relevant opinions over the past several decades. I can only assume you are not familiar with the basic premises of campaign finance first amendment law, since you keep accusing me of "inventing" something. But rather than call you "intellectually dishonest" or "spreading falsehoods" or whatever, I will just suggest you read the relevant opinions before you do the same.



Yes, which is why the proper response of the court would have been to say that the law in question was unconstitutional as applied to ideological issue groups like Citizens United. This is what the court did in the past (in cases such as MCFL).

But that isn't what the court did. In an incredible feat of judicial activism, they went out of their way to ask for reargument to decide whether the law was facially unconstitutional in all cases (as opposed to simply as applied to ideological non-profit corporations such as Citizens United). This is even more egregious, because Citizens United is a very atypical group (the very group for which as applied rulings are most common).

So yes, corruption was not even a direct concern in CU, which is precisely why they should not have gone out of their way to address the broad issue in this particular case (and instead rule narrowly). Even some of Citizen's United most ardent defenders agree that they should never have decided the broadest form of the question in this particular case, and instead decided the law's facial constitutionality when a case came before them from a for-profit corporation (where concerns about corruption are at their peak).