Russ Feingold against Citizens United

[MBS]

from Stanford Law Review
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/money-crisis

concluding excerpts:

. . . Justice John Paul Stevens, in his stinging ninety-page dissent in Citizens United, recognized the danger in the majority’s departure from precedent regarding corporate regulation:

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.[17]

. ...

The Court has a clear opportunity. A new challenge from Montana, based on that state's historic anti-corruption laws, could allow the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision in Citizens United, and at least two justices have hinted that the 2010 ruling is untenable. In granting a stay of a Montana Supreme Court decision upholding that state’s anticorruption laws, Justice Ginsburg, writing with Justice Breyer, found the pulse of the chaos Citizens United has wrought: “Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.’”[18]

Justice Ginsburg is correct. Today’s framework for corruption cannot stand.