Justice Scalia to Speak at Wesleyan

[johnwesley]

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In Citizens United, the issue was not campaign spending.

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<p>parent57 - In all honesty, I think this is where your lack of legal training betrays itself. <em>Of course</em> <em>Citizens United</em> was about campaign spending. McCain-Feingold is about campaign spending.</p>

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Citizen United was a non-profit corporation that had produced a film critical of Hillary Clinton and attempted to air the film in violation of the McCain-Feingold Act

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<p>Let’s go back too my comment @post25 (which, btw, you said, was too narrow an interpretation):

It’s clear that the AFL-CIO was counting on a decision along narrow lines, i.e., whether an idependently funded broadcast of a pseudo-documentary called, “Hillary” passed “the functional equivalency” test that had been handed down in an earlier decision. That decision (I believe it was the one they refer to as <em>McConnell</em>) said, that if the ad or the communication had the same effect as advocating for or against a particular candidate, it could be covered by McCain-Feingold.</p>

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<p>Let’s be clear about this: Citizens United was a Political Action Committee. Before <em>Citizens United</em> there was a pretty clear distinction made between PACs and for-profit corporations. A PAC could not have as its <em>primary</em> purpose the defeat or the election of a particular candidate although it could freely advocate for a particular cause or issue. They were supposed to exist for educational purposes only. All of those distinctions were wiped out by the Court’s decision in CU. </p>

<p>OTOH, if you were General Electric, clearly a FOR-profit corporation, you could not produce campaign ads for or against a particular candidate in an election. Why? Because, for over a hundred years the Court saw no difference between contributing directly to the Republican party in order to produce an ad critical of Hillary Clinton – which is prohibited under the 1907 Tillman Act – and producing the SAME EXACT AD yourself, if you were General Electric. The Court’s majority seems to think there is a distinction where common sense sees none.</p>

<p>As I’ve repeated several times now, Justice Scalia chose to toss a hunded years of legal precedent out the window in order to give Citizens United a win.</p>