MouthBQ98 said:
Free speech applies to groups of citizens as well as individual citizens. You don't lose your right to speech just because you and someone else cooperate to present a message.
That's the basis of it.
Also, there's no requirement to be a citizen to have free speech protections under the constitution. Within our jurisdiction, it is recognized as a fundamental God given human right, and something we believe all people should have.
Yes, the issue of foreign influence on corporate speech is a problem when it is used to manipulate government policy but in my view, more speech is always preferable to speech restrictions.
The government itself should not be engaged in manipulating freedom of speech or propagandizing the population outside of perhaps patriotic messaging.
We have campaign contribution limits that are based on different factors: individual contributions, specific campaign/candidate, and national party, to name just 3. If the intent of the first amendment was to actually apply free speech and expression to campaign contributions, wouldn't there be either no limits or consistency of limits? How exactly are these limits "time, place, and/or manner" restrictions to speech that the courts over the years have said are reasonable restrictions? They have nothing to do with time and place, and manner is a bit convoluted. Manner deals with something like criminal behavior: even the most anti-crime person agrees that writing an article advocating that certain criminal behavior be legalized is protected speech. Likewise, with respect to campaign contributions, it has little to nothing to do with it.
So the question is, if this is a first amendment issue, how can it be regulated? Either there should be no campaign contribution limits because it is a FA issue and the limits aren't reasonable restrictions (see above), OR, it isn't a FA issue and, given 10th Amendment leeway, Congress can regulate. The "analysis" the Citizens United court, as well as the Buckley court it relied upon, went through is mental gymnastics, to say the least. Essentially, 1) its free speech; 2) government can't control it, except... 3) certain limits can be in place to prevent government corruption.
Like many cases, the USSC made up their mind where they wanted to go and came up with legal "reasoning" to get there. The terribly inconsistent ways we've interpreted the first amendment over the years, giving almost unlimited leeway to certain speech while restricting others (wearing of protest t-shirts in school is protected while prayer isn't, for example) at the very least leaves one to wonder.
The bottom line is that none of these decisions are any more based on the constitution than what you or I think; they're just the opinions of 5 or more justices at one time who were probably advocates of whatever policy they were writing about.
