Reversing Citizens United: Is A Constitutional Amendment Needed?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/14343

Submitted by Doug Cunningham on October 27, 2010 - 3:31pm
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By Doug Cunningham

With massive amounts of corporate money anonymously flooding into campaigns nationwide as a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, one group has launched an effort to fix it by amending the U.S. constitution. Kaya Rebane is with the south-central Wisconsin chapter of the national group Move To Amend.

: "We think that it's important to actually amend the constitution to undo Citizens United because the Citizens United decision was based on two ideas - that corporations are people and money is speech. And if you try to fix this legislatively you run into the problem that the Supreme Court will strike down any laws that are passed saying that corporations should not be considered persons and money should not be considered speech. You also can't rely on the Supreme Court to fix this in the future because they might, they might not. But even if they do it could be overturned by a future court. So really what we need to do is amend the constitution to make it clear that corporations are not people and money is not speech."

[skepticscott]

1. Uh, no...not even close

The Citizens United decision was based on ONE idea: That under the First Amendment, Congress should not be allowed to restrict political speech. The decision had nothing to do with corporate personhood whatsoever, and the people who keep repeating that meme are simply being dishonest. Nowhere does the First Amendment restrict free speech protections to individuals. Ditto for the oft-repeated "Money is not speech!" screed. No one has ever said that money and speech are exactly the same thing. The point is that the right to raise and spend money is inexorably linked to the ability to disseminate political messages. Like it or not, that's a fact and always has been. A restriction on one is a restriction on the other, as everyone who criticizes this decision understands implicitly, but refuses to acknowledge.

A constitutional amendment would be the first to ever weaken First Amendment protections in over 200 years.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Another ruling that overrules/overturns the prior SC decision but

that won't be anytime soon.