Citizens United org 2

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1/16 will disaggregate org from court case

no merri

see Bossie

see floyd brown

see ag patrick morissey big booster

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note 3 -4 sis shuffle, 527

also bak

bossie: see new scams at end; fired for doctoring tapes a la o'keefe later

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amicus win student debt w/ trump coup traitor

fixed:

boos

CITIZENS UNITED

1006 Penn. Ave. S.E. WILLIAM J. OLSON, P.C.

Washington, DC (202) 547-5420

WILLIAM J. OLSON* wjo@mindspring.com

JEREMIAH L. MORGAN

ROBERT J. OLSON

20003 370 Maple Ave. W., Ste. 4

Vienna, VA 22180

(703) 356-5070

RICK BOYER

INTEGRITY LAW FIRM *Counsel of Record

P.O. Box 10953

Lynchburg, VA 24506 Attorneys for Amici Curiae

(434) 401-2093

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amicus

America First Legal Foundation v. USDA, No. 23-5173 (D.C. Cir. 2025) :: Justia

united States Court of AppealsFOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUITArgued September 5, 2024Decided January 24, 2025No. 23-5173

AMERICA FIRST LEGAL FOUNDATION, APPELLANTv.UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE,ET AL.,APPELLEESAppeal from the United States District Courtfor the District of Columbia(No. 1:22-cv-03029)Daniel Epstein argued the cause for appellant.

With him on the briefs were Reed D. Rubinstein and Michael Ding.Jay Alan Sekulow, Jordan Sekulow, Andrew J. Ekonomou, Benjamin P. Sisney, and Nathan Moelkerwere on the brief for amicus curiae

the American Center for Law and Justice in support of appellant.Jeremiah L. Morgan and William J. Olson

were on the brief for amicus curiae Citizens United in support of appellant.Jeffrey E. Sandberg, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, argued the cause for appellees. With him on the brief were

...

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Citizens United is a nonprofit social welfare organization, exempt from federal income tax under Internal Revenue Code (“IRC”) section 501(c)(4).

Citizens United Foundation is a nonprofit educational and legal organization, exempt from federal income tax under IRC section 501(c)(3). These organizations were established, inter alia, to participate in the public policy process, including conducting research, and informing and educating the public on the proper construction of state and federal constitutions, as well as statutes related to the rights of citizens, and questions related to human and civil rights secured by law.

The Presidential Coalition, LLC is a political committee under IRC section 527. These amici are dedicated to restoring government to the people through a commitment to limited government, federalism, individual liberty, and free enterprise. Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation regularly participate as litigants (e.g., Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)) and amici in important cases in which these legal principles are at stake. The Presidential Coalition has filed amicus briefs in numerous similar cases.

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tw shannon pow okla AA

Vote Smart | Facts For All

2024 Endorsements

President

Donald Trump

Governor

Patrick Morrisey

U.S. Senate

Ted Cruz

Alex Mooney

Bernie Moreno

U.S. HouseTRUMP COUP BIDEN IMPEACH

Michael Cloud

James Comer, Jr.

Andy Harris

Jim Jordan

Scott Perry

Chip Roy

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2023

governor
Daniel Cameron
Attorney General
Russell Coleman

2022

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2020

Attorney General
Patrick Morrisey

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2016

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https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-1086/222274/20220502123219863_21-1086-tsac-Citizens%20United.pdf

BRADLEY A. BENBROOK Counsel of Record STEPHEN M. DUVERNAY Benbrook Law Group, PC 701 University Ave., Ste. 106 Sacramento, California 95825 (916) 447-4900 brad@benbrooklawgroup.com Counsel for Amici Curiae

INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE1

Citizens United andCitizens United Foundation are dedicated to restoring government to the people through a commitment to limited government, federalism, individual liberties, and free enterprise. Amici regularly participate as litigants (e.g., Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)) and amici in important cases in which these fundamental principles are at stake. Citizens United is a nonprofit social welfare organization exempt from federal income tax under Internal Revenue Code (“IRC”) section 501(c)(4).

Citizens United Foundation is a nonprofit educational and legal organization exempt from federal income tax under IRC section 501(c)(3). These organizations were established to, among other things, participate in the public policy process, including conducting research, and informing and educating the public on the proper construction of state and federal constitutions, as well as statutes related to the rights of citizens, and questions related to human and civil rights secured by law. The Presidential Coalition, LLC is an IRC section 527 political organization that was founded to educate the American public on the value of having principled conservative Republican leadership at all levels of government, and to support the election of conservative candidates to state and local government and the appointment of conservatives to leadership positions at the federal and state level in order to advance conservative public policy initiatives.

[cya?]

No counsel for a party authored any part of this brief.And no one other than the amicus or their members or counsel financed the brief’s preparation or submission. The parties have filed blanket consents to the filing of this brief and their letters of consent are on file with the Clerk.

---

random 921

cU Files FOIA Lawsuit Vs. State Department For Documents Relating To COVID-19 Origins Citizens United Files FOIA Lawsuit Vs. State Department For Documents...
Citizens United Statement In Opposition To H.R. 4 "In just seven months, Biden and the Democrats have created...
CU v. State FOIA Lawsuit (WestExec) Citizens United filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit...
CU v. State Dept. Lawsuit - Wuhan Lab Leak Theory Citizens United filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit...

cU Files FOIA Lawsuit Vs. State Department For Documents Relating To COVID-19 Origins

Citizens United Files FOIA Lawsuit Vs. State Department For Documents...

Citizens United Statement In Opposition To H.R. 4

"In just seven months, Biden and the Democrats have created...

CU v. State FOIA Lawsuit (WestExec)

Citizens United filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit...

CU v. State Dept. Lawsuit - Wuhan Lab Leak Theory

Citizens United filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit...

CU In The News

CU President David Bossie appears on The Joe Piscopo Show to discuss Biden's handling of Afghanistan Citizens United President David Bossie appears on The Joe Piscopo...
Axios: GOP ad-makers jump on Afghan footage Another GOP-aligned group, Citizens United, is running similar ads. They...
Vanity Fair: Republicans Are Weaponizing Afghanistan Chaos To Get Ahead In 2022 Another conservative group, Citizens United, is running an ad likening...
CU President David Bossie on The Water Cooler Citizens United President David Bossie on The Water Cooler to...

CU President David Bossie appears on The Joe Piscopo Show to discuss Biden's handling of Afghanistan

Citizens United President David Bossie appears on The Joe Piscopo...

Axios: GOP ad-makers jump on Afghan footage

Another GOP-aligned group, Citizens United, is running similar ads. They...

Vanity Fair: Republicans Are Weaponizing Afghanistan Chaos To Get Ahead In 2022

Another conservative group, Citizens United, is running an ad likening...

CU President David Bossie on The Water Cooler

Citizens United President David Bossie on The Water Cooler to...

9/21

176pp?! no lnx docs

Personnel

David N. Bossie serves as President of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation.^[2]
Michael Boos serves as Vice President and General Counsel of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation.^[3]
Mary Beth Brown, wife of Citizens United founder Floyd G. Brown, is Program Chairman of Citizens United for Family, a project of the Citizens United Foundation^[4], and founder of the National Committee for Faith and Family.
Ron Robinson is a Director of Citizens United and the Citizens United Foundation.^[5]
Cliff Kincaid is Director of Citizens United Foundation's American Sovereignty Action Project.

Mission

The Citizens United Foundation donation page^[6] describes its mission thusly:

"Citizens United Foundation informs the American people about public policy issues related to traditional American values, including: The Constitution as the supreme limit on federal power; a strong national defense as the primary role of the federal government; free enterprise as the economic system that has enabled the American people to attain and maintain an historically high standard of living; belief in God and Judeo/Christian values as the fundamental attribute of our way of life; and the recognition of the family as the basic social unit of our society."

In 2006, the Citizens United Foundation was described by Charity Navigator as "an educational organization, which conducts research, and informs and educates the public on various national and international issues. The Foundation's programs include the Traditional Values Program, which provides research, publication and public distribution of educational materials in defense of traditional American values; and the Legal and Judicial Action Program, which provides research and publication of materials relating to the American court system, and legal research and litigation support in defense of human and civil rights. In addition, the Foundation produces, distributes and markets documentary films focusing on contemporary domestic and international issues."^[7]

In a 1997 amicus curiae brief^[8], the Citizens United Foundation described itself as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan, educational organization established to conduct research and to inform and educate the public on a variety of issues of national importance, including issues related to sovereignty, separation of powers, the original intent of the Framers and the correct interpretation of the United States Constitution."

Activities

Political ads

The Foundation sponsored ads in support of President George W. Bush "and our Troops" in an anti anti-war movement. "The ads featured former Senator and star of 'Law and Order' Fred Thompson. The ads encouraged ALL Americans to come together and Support President Bush and our men and women in uniform as they fight the war on terror."^[9] See Citizen United's YouTube page^[10] and Fred Thompson ads "Courage"^[11] and "Soldier"^[12] posted on YouTube by the Foundation.

In September 2005, as President George W. Bush addressed the United Nations as it celebrated its 60th anniversary, the Foundation posted "ads on a truck circling the block just outside the UN building, on a ferry on the East River, and on a billboard banner across 42nd Street from the UN" in a "new advertising campaign blasting the world organization" ... The "signs reading Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60 ... [were] advertisements for a new, in-depth documentary on UN failures".^[13]

American Sovereignty Action Project

Funding

The Presidential Coalition

Expenditure records show The Presidential Coalition making disbursements for rent and payroll to Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation.^[14][15]

Donations: Donatelli Group and the Swift Boat connection

The Citizens United Foundation's donation page^[16] states that "Your generous, tax-deductible gift at this time will help us restore the control of our government back to its citizenry."

Donations to the Citizens United Foundation can be made through DonationReport.com, plus an extension code for Citizens United Foundation.^[17] Citizens United utilizes DonationReport.com for its online store using a separate extension code.

The connection for the DonationReport.com website^[18] arrives at a Login^[19]—requiring both a User ID and Password—which belongs to eDonation.com, a member of The Donatelli Group, a fundraising company that has raised campaign funds for the Republican National Committee, Republican National Convention, Bush-Cheney '04 Inc., John McCain, the NRA^[20] and an exhaustive list of Republican members of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as other political organizations.^[21]

The Donatelli Group, using its "primary segment" Campaign Solutions^[22], is associated with Creative Response Concepts, the public relations firm that advised Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the "organization that accused Kerry of inflating his Vietnam War record" during the 2004 presidential campaign.^[23]

The Donatelli Group, which produced the RNC website^[24], also created the SWIFTBOATVETSFORTRUTH.ORG website July 30, 2004, with Connell Donatelli Inc.^[25] (a.k.a. The Donatelli Group) as Registrant. Connell Donatelli Inc. was also listed as both Administrator and the Tech Organization for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth website.^[26]

Mailing lists

The Citizens United Foundation Mailing List is offered for sale by NextMark.^[27]

Contact information

1006 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE

Washington, DC 20003

Phone: 202 547-5420

Toll-Free: 800 362-4788

FAX: 202 547-5421

URL: http://www.citizensunited.org/

Resources and articles

References

↑ Citizens United Foundation, Citizens United website.
↑ Guest info: David N. Bossie, NewsGuests.com, accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ About: Michael Boos, Citizens United; cache file accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ Principals and Consultants, Past and Present of Citizens United (CU), The Stealth PACs/Public Citizen, accessed July 3, 2007. No further information regarding Citizens United for Family has been located.
↑ Staff: Ron Robinson, Young America's Foundation, accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ Citizens United Foundation, DonationReport.com, accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ Current Rating: Citizens United Foundation, CharityNavigator.org, 2006.
↑ *Amicus curiae*, MikeNew.com, 1997.
↑ Citizens United website.
↑ www.youtube/user/citizensunited.
↑ Citizens United Foundation, April 2003; posted on YouTube.
↑ Citizens United Foundation, April 2003; posted on YouTube.
↑ Chris Field, "Billboards at UN Blast 60 Years of Failure and Corruption," Human Events Online, September 15, 2005.
↑ The Presidential Coalition, LLC. "527" Political Organization Filing Information: Expenditure Details, CampaignMoney.com (page 1).
↑ The Presidential Coalition, LLC. "527" Political Organization Filing Information: Expenditure Details, CampaignMoney.com (page 2).
↑ Citizens United Foundation, DonationReport.com, accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ DonationReport.com processing center, accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ DonationReport.com website.
↑ Login page, DonationReport.com.
↑ Erin McPike, "Two Republican Web Giants Form Connell Donatelli Inc.," CampaignLine.com, August 20, 2004.
↑ Clients, CampaignSolutions.com.
↑ edonation.com website
↑ News data file, Committee for Justice.
↑ "Information on the RNC Organizers," OnePeoplesProject.com, last updated August 29, 2004; accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ ConnellDonatelli.com website.
↑ "Re: Bush, O'Neill, Swifties and Purple Heart Band-aids," Mailgate, September 11, 2004; accessed July 3, 2007.
↑ Citizens United Foundation Mailing List, Lists.NextMark.com.

External articles

Citizens United Foundation, The New Stealth PACs/Public Citizen.
Citizens United in the Wikipedia.

Category:

Politics (U.S.)

textfire, see prev

...What we’ll call ‘Mercer Money’ was also funneled into Citizens United’s coffers, to the tune of another 2 million dollars. This cash was at least partly used to fund Bannon & Bossie’s 4th Citizens United Productions collaboration, The Hope and the Change, an anti-Obama movie which premiered at the August Republican National Convention and played in theatres & on cable TV up through Election Day. Once again, the Citizens United v FEC decision enabled that release schedule.

And yet despite all of this intrigue, perhaps the most important development and deployment of Mercer Money in 2012 came in the form of a $5,000,000 investment in a relatively unknown British defense contractor, then called Strategic Communication Laboratories Ltd but now known as SCL Group. The Mercers tossed the pounds across the pond to enable data analytics research, with Rebekah wanting a “results-oriented consultant.”

https://medium.com/@textifire/dukakis-to-donald-30-years-of-citizens-united-652e81eb3d0e

TEXTFIRE

no lnx

May 15, 2017·

Donald Trump’s ubiquitous portrayal as a renegade outsider, beholden to no political party or established decorum, might be the most unacknowledged fake news item of the past two years. Despite a lack of name recognition — or perhaps precisely because of their anonymity — the various forces working to install a President Trump have been actively pursuing their goals for a very long time.

Gears of this machine were turning years before Trump declared his 2016 candidacy, no matter what the Donald is saying to the contrary these days. All the major players were settling into their roles not only long before recent public awareness heated up, but well into the last millenium.

To catch up with current events, let’s rewind a few decades.

1988Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of Ronald “Win One Proxy War for the Gipper” Reagan, had his underperforming campaign derailed by a TV advertisement paid for by a political action committee (PAC). Titled “Weekend Passes”, but colloquially known as the ‘Willie Horton ad’, it painted Dukakis as having shared responsibility for heinous crimes committed by a convicted murderer who’d run away while out on weekend furlough from a life sentence in prison.

Dukakis had endorsed but not initiated the furlough program while serving as governor of Massachusetts, but the facts became irrelevant in the wake of such a shocking true crime storyline. The discussion surrounding the accusations had been percolating for a few months prior to the TV ad’s debut on 22 Sept ’88, but controversy then erupted and dominated chatter straight through the election.

George H.W. Bush — the Republican nominee, sitting Vice President, former CIA chief, and staunch death penalty advocate — had begun to hype the Horton tale that summer, after taking a cue from Al Gore’s criticism of the furlough program during the Democratic primaries. Bush’s opposition research team then zeroed in on Horton as an excellent chance to play up racist fears and hammer Dukakis’s ‘soft’ Massachusetts liberalism.

Bush’s campaign team was led by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, both of whom were known for their no-holds-barred electioneering & media manipulation tactics. Atwater had been senior partner since 1984 at Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, PR sister to the lobbying firm first co-founded during Reagan’s 1980 candidacy by longtime Trump allies Paul Manafort and Roger Stone; he was also a firm believer in playing the electoral race card by proxy as part of the new Southern Strategy. Ailes was a high-profile GOP strategist who had pioneered the concept of politicians as saleable products, and who’d later become ex-CEO, founder, and alleged serial sex fiend of Fox News.

Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater in 1985 (Getty)]

Ailes latched on to the Horton angle, running focus groups in May ’88 which found ‘Reagan Democrats’ responded very well to its inherent negativity, with many test subjects completely turning against Dukakis after hearing some choice accusations. Smelling blood, Atwater boasted to GOP brass, “By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name.” Ailes agreed, saying: “The only question is whether we show Willie Horton with a knife in his hand, or without.”

Bush then began acting on those focus group results by first mentioning furloughs during the June ’88 Texas Republican convention, after which his poll numbers finally started to climb past those of then-frontrunner Dukakis. Traditionalist-leaning Readers Digest conveniently published a Horton article in July titled “Getting Away With Murder,” which the Bush campaign reprinted for its own mass distribution. Bush continued to highlight the angle that summer, even going so far as to reference it during his Republican National Convention (RNC) nomination acceptance speech in August.

Ailes and Atwater would go on to create a followup ad for the official Bush campaign known as “Revolving Door”, which effectively replaced the Willie Horton ad after an abbreviated 2-week TV run, debuting it on 5 Oct 1988. Horton wasn’t named or shown, but actors were depicted as ‘scary criminals’ going in & out of prison all willy-nilly. Both of these ads led to extensive media coverage of the ads themselves, remarkably, with the major TV networks’ nightly newscasts frequently discussing them during October and November.

Scarecap from “Weekend Passes” (Source)]

The first Willie Horton attack ad is credited to media hitman Larry McCarthy,working on behalf of the Americans for Bush (aka AmBush) offshoot of the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC). McCarthy had spent the previous seven years working as a senior executive for Ailes Communications, creating ads for his mentor Roger Ailes while assisting a number of high-profile GOP candidates throughout the 80s.

Another former Ailes employee involved in the ad production was Floyd Brown, who was serving as president of Americans for Bush at the time, though he is widely acknowledged as the true mastermind behind both ads. In fact, official complaints were filed after the election alleging illegal collusion between the Bush campaign and AmBush/NSPAC.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated the allegations, but despite evidence of communication between the organizations, the FEC commissioners deadlocked 3 to 3 on reaching an official decision. Therefore, no punishment was disbursed and no rule advisories were made. PR guru Roger Stone has since claimed Atwater showed off the “Weekend Passes” tape to him, prior to handing it off to NSPAC for distribution.

Also after the election, in November 1988, an AmBush-invigorated Floyd Brown decided to strike out on his own — with a dollop of financial help from the Koch brothers — and start a new political “nonprofit”, bearing a name you might recognize: Citizens United.

Greetings from David Bossie!

1992

As the Bush 41 presidency was gearing up for its reelection campaign, Citizens United was preparing for its first. That election cycle saw Brown bring aboard David Bossie as ‘chief researcher’ & director of political affairs, but he would become the key member of the organization throughout the following 25 years. Bossie had cut his teeth at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute from 1988–90, but he lucked into his true calling in 1992 when Bill Clinton skyrocketed to fame.

Starting in early ’92, Brown & Bossie (really the only 2 people at Citizens in those days) went hard after Clinton, beginning with an investigation into his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Citizens set up a 1–900 hotline phone number which purported to play exclusive recordings of Flowers and Clinton’s conversations for $4.99/minute, though the tapes were in fact fraudulently manipulated & doctored, which implored customers to call “our Bill Clinton fact line and learn first-hand about Clinton’s womanizing, drug use, draft dodging and other lies.” They would also go on to publish the weekly gossip newsletter Clintonwatch, which was regularly sent to over 1,200 journalists.

Bossie also managed to get into a fistfight in Little Rock, Arkansas — while boarding a flight inside an airport — because he refused to pay a private investigator named Larry Case, who was hired to dig up dirt on Roger Clinton, Bill’s wayward brother. Case was representing the [somehow unrelated to CU] organization he co-founded, Citizens for Honest Government, which had originally drummed up the Flowers allegations and would go on to produce the popular direct-mail attack DVD Clinton Chronicles, promoted and distributed by Reverend Jerry Falwell.

After ‘leaking’ allegations to 30 major news bureaus in April, Bossie repeatedly contacted & stalked the family of a long-dead suicide victim for “confirmation” of an affair with Bill Clinton. In July, he followed the late woman’s mother to a hospital, where her husband was seriously ill and recovering from a stroke, and then “burst into the sick man’s room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter’s suicide.”

By popular demand: Citizens United (L) vs. Citizens for Honest Government (R)]

Though none of this negative publicity was ultimately able to derail Clinton’s campaign, two other challengers stirred up intrigue during the ’92 election.

Former Reagan administration Director of Communications Pat Buchanan spent a great deal of time attacking the Clintons (and the rest of the time hyping his tagline of “America First, Second and Third”), often using the same talking points Citizens United were attempting to disseminate, which nearly allowed him to defeat Bush in the key New Hampshire primary. He ended up fading away, but his infamously religio-nativist “culture war” speech at the August RNC event focused on his personal feelings of disgust for Hillary Clinton. (Note that Hillary was only yet popularly known as a spouse, not a politician.)

Ross Perot ran as an Independent and was a surprisingly strong contender for a short period of time after he joined the race in May. In early June, Perot led the national public opinion polls with support from 39% of the voters (versus 31% for Bush and 25% for Clinton). His numbers started to slip before he suddenly dropped out of the race in July, only to rejoin the fray in October.

Perot’s explanation for his midsummer’s disappearance was that he’d been blackmailed by what he thought were third-party affiliates of the Bush campaign, an accusation which included the familiar-sounding claim that POTUS Bush was having his CIA friends employ “dirty tricks” of wiretapping Perot’s phone lines and installing viruses on his computers.

Based on what we know about Bossie & Brown’s behaviors that year, it’s a little surprising we can find no news reports exploring any potential links between Citizens and Buchanan, nor any items being anything less than spitefully condescending toward Perot and the possibility that his paranoia might be based on true events.

In fact, the only major player to call out Bossie’s behavior that year was President Bush, who repeatedly repudiated Citizens’ “filthy campaign tactics” during 1992. His son Dubya denounced Floyd Brown’s behaviors in a letter to supporters asking them not to donate to Citizens, and Bush publicly took issue with the wildly unethical Flowers hotline, calling it “the kind of sleaze that diminishes the political process.” To his exceedingly rare credit, Bush even filed a complaint with the FEC in July ’92 against Brown’s Citizens-related Presidential Victory Committee and Bossie’s stalking of the suicide victim’s family.

So that makes two elections in a row with major FEC complaints filed against the media manipulations of Floyd Brown (with help from his protégé David Bossie), and yet no punishment was doled out. Howa bout that.

Literary oeuvre of David N. Bossie

2000

David Bossie stayed in the thick of political dealings during the 1990s, serving as a key personal aide with the Senate Whitewater Committee and later as chief investigator for the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, which was then primarily devoted to unearthing campaign finance crimes of POTUS Clinton.

Bossie made many enemies when he did things like urge his boss to reenact the death of former White House deputy counsel Vince Foster — officially ruled a suicide but an ongoing obsession of “Clinton crazies” & Whitewatergaters — by shooting bullets into a melon in the backyard of the congressman’s home. He repeatedly leaked incendiary conspiracy theories to all-too-willing reporters, drawing the ire of his colleagues, but he finally ended up being fired in 1998 for [again] falsifying key evidence.

A frequent boast of Bossie’s was that he had major news media wrapped around his finger, using his dozens of pitched New York Times articles as examples. That power evidently didn’t satiate him, as Bossie caught the film bug and edited a video to fraudulently implicate Hillary Clinton in a crime, prompting then-Speaker Newt Gingrich —who resigned under GOP fire six months later — to demand Bossie’s resignation and unleash a tirade stating “the circus” that was the Oversight Committee should feel “embarrassed”.

Bossie took over as president of Citizens United in 2000 but laid reasonably low for the next few years, continuing to establish several activist ‘nonprofits’ under the CU banner. He popped back into the spotlight in 2004 to file his own complaint with the FEC, by which he’d attempted to get Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 blocked from public showings within 60 days prior to Election Day. His plan failed, as the FEC found Fahrenheit to not be “electioneering communications,” and therefore not subject to FEC oversight.

That decision must have haunted Bossie, for he filed another FEC complaint in 2007, this time because the new multimillion-dollar-budget Citizens United Productions hitpiece Hillary: The Movie was blocked from cable TV & paid public airings within 30 days prior to the January 2008 primaries. In this instance the FEC found Citizens’ first big film to indeed be biased electioneering communications, and upheld the ‘ban’ based on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, commonly referred to as ‘McCain-Feingold’.

2008

The BCRA had been the culmination of an extremely long fight over campaign finance reform, which extended back further than the initial creation of the FEC in 1974, even back to the seminal Tillman Act of 1907. Most modern US campaign finance laws were defined in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, with subsequent amendments in the wake of Watergate leading to the establishment of the FEC. Further changes throughout the ’70s chipped away at those laws, easing restrictions on outside money and political ads.

Lincoln Club of Orange County presents… “Literally Nuclear Holocaust”]

Though advertisements, ‘soft money’, and nonprofits/PACs were certainly nothing new in 1988 — as Roger Ailes, former Nixon media aide & breakout star of bestseller The Selling of the President 1968 can attest — the ‘Willie Horton ad’ series of events had pried open a floodgate. Eyes were opened to that sea change when Citizens United blew the gates wide in 1992, but Bush 41 vetoed a reform bill before he left office. BCRA was originally set to launch in 1995, but struggled through seven years of DC infighting before it finally passed in 2002. McCain-Feingold’s fiercest opponent during those years had been majority whip Mitch McConnell, who then immediately mounted his own Supreme Court challenge against the new laws.

The BCRA mandated that clear electioneering communications and issue advocacy ads for federal candidates without disclaimers — focusing on political topics, as opposed to blatant demands for votes — could not be aired within 30 days of a primary vote, nor within 60 days of a general election. Had the BCRA existed in 1988, these regulations could have rendered illegal the late September debut airing of the Willie Horton ad.

Just as in the ’70s, the regulations were chipped away through a series of Supreme Court cases, but it was Bossie et al’s dogged pursuit of Citizens United v FEC case that struck a crushing blow. Argued in front of the Supreme Court twice in 2009, which is unusual, 21 January 2010 saw the Court strike down key provisions of BCRA related to donation limits, independent expenditures, and electioneering communications.

Citizens’ lawyer during that time was Ted Olson, who was legal counsel for Ronald Reagan during his defense against Iran-Contra allegations; assisted Paula Jones, a Bill Clinton accuser; represented Bush in 2004’s Bush v Gore, for which he would be rewarded with a Solicitor General appointment; and went on to work for Hobby Lobby, Rudy Giuliani, Paul Ryan, and Tom Brady.

? Bossie is a hugger ?

Olson successfully argued — with help from Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia’s leading interrogation — for what amounted to near-total elimination of regulations defining issue advocacy electioneering communications and [protected/free] corporate speech. This occurred despite the dissenting Court opinion, which proclaimed the 5–4 decision and its cited precedent to be “not a correct statement of the law.”

A large majority of the attention the case has publicly received focuses on the idea that it resulted in the establishment of something to the effect of: ‘corporations are people, too, so they have a right to freedom of speech, and money is a form of speech, which means corporations are now free to speak as loudly as they want via PACs & now SuperPACs.’ That interpretation is not wrong, but what gets lost at the end of that translation is the true ultimate mechanism of the $peechbuck$: media, marketing & advertising.

Campaigns need money to rent hotels and pay travel expenses, but the largest disbursements of funds are almost always related to advertising. Things like banners, buttons, signs, and especially mass media communications are the tools used to amplify ‘speech’. Third party political advocacy previously had clearly outlined limitations, but in Citizens the Court decided that the previous bar of defining “electioneering communications” was too unwieldy.

Buckley v Valeo in 1976 had established the “eight magic words” which defined express political advocacy were: “vote for; vote against; elect; support; cast your ballot for; [Smith] for [Congress]; defeat; reject,” or any variations thereof. Disseminated media — meaning created content such as film, print, audio, etc. — which did not contain those words was largely exempt from campaign finance laws.

In Citizens, those ‘eight magic words’ were thrown out, as the Court said they violated the First Amendment right to free speech; the Roberts Court also declared that a corporation, if considered as a group of people which collectively holds the same rights as a “person”, would also be entitled to that right. With that list of clearly defined linguistic restrictions no longer in place, the Court simultaneously proclaimed that the effort required to parse out the intent of all suspect pieces of media would be too great a burden for the federal government. As a result, nearly all unofficial media is exempt from campaign finance laws, which means the soft money (“independent expenditure” and 3rd-party sourcing) used to produce the media is also exempt from campaign finance laws.

The logic of that decision seems to be a self-contained feedback loop, where corporations — nonprofit, such as the plaintiff Citizens United, and for-profit, for no apparent reason — were magically granted the common human right of free speech, but only as a means to anoint them with an entitlement to totally unfettered freedom to purchase infinite levels of amplification to broadcast that speech. Only the wealthy can afford exorbitant advertising costs.

Co’s r Völker 2. (RedBubble)]

To that end, the popular adage of “corporations are people, too” was one result, though tweaking the tagline to ‘corporate personhood mandates deregulation of the dissemination of obscenely expensive political advertising & propaganda’ could perhaps provide a stronger vector of situational awareness. Unfortunately, our version doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, plus superficial imagery dictates optimum virality.

With these newly opened doors to political speech-via-media, unregulated issue advocacy using independent expenditures became a wide-open battleground. Suddenly, something like Hillary: The Movie could be engineered to target voters with no funding, calendar, or content restrictions. Bossie’s efforts to accomplish this feat did not go unnoticed during the case’s journey up the ladder to the Supreme Court, and in 2008 he had already started making some new best friends.

First to the party was chronic gatecrasher and Hollywood reject Steve Bannon.

Bannon & that ducks guy ? Bossie]

Bannon had joined up with and violently commandeered a variety of projects since quitting the Navy and Goldman Sachs, including his implosion of climate research project Biosphere 2; a soap opera at a World of Warcraft videogame-gold-mining operation; and horning in on Saudi investment deals.

He’d managed to broker the deal for TV syndication of Seinfeld, as well as secure executive producer credits on 2 movies in the ’90s and buy out indie film distributor Wellspring Media, but he and his longtime writing partner had failed to get even one of their own original projects made during their 18 years together; not even their gory, sexy space opera about intergalactic “beings of light”, based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, nor their rap musical based on the Bard’s Coriolanus.

Looking to finally do something successful and not stolen, Bannon had self-funded his first and then-only movie in 2004, a love letter to Ronald Reagan based on a book by Peter Schweizer (so, mostly not stolen). It was at the L.A. premiere of that film where Bannon met Andrew Breitbart, who was then working with the highly influential conservative news aggregator The Drudge Report, striking a friendship that would soon see Bannon joining Breitbart’s eponymous new media startup on the explosively blossoming “internet” (keep in mind 2004 was the year thefacebook.com launched on college campuses, before opening up to the public and becoming Facebook the following year).

Speaking of the Gipper, however, Bannon certainly took interest in the fact that Bossie had also produced a separate Reagan movie via Citizens in 2008. The video was hosted by Newt Gingrich, who must’ve had a change of heart after being “embarrassed” a decade earlier by Bossie’s House Oversight Committee falsifications.

After he and Bossie met in 2008, Citizens United Productions would go on to produce Bannon’s next 3 ‘films’ and another 3 over the following few years, comprising the lion’s share of the company’s output. All of their collaborations were exactly the sort of issue advocacy affected by the Citizens United v FEC decision, all attacked Democrats & the Left, all were expensive propaganda pieces paid for by dark money, and all were released in election years: 2010, 2012, and 2016.

All 6 Bannon-Bossie joints]

Soon after Bossie came into his life, Bannon’s writing partner Julia Jones said his political views took a dark turn. Jones stopped working with Bannon in 2009 because he had become so fixated on the destruction of left-wing politics and the eradication of poor people. Though Bannon had been meandering down that road for years, Jones has said she blames Bossie for the final twisted transformation.

Another new fan of Bossie’s was Steve Wynn, the hotel and casino magnate. Wynn noticed Bossie’s brash style and his success with the final Court ruling, so Wynn passed along his admiration to his dear frenemy, Donald J. Trump. Bossie and Trump ending up meeting in early 2010, around the same time as Bannon & Bossie released their first feature together, Generation Zero, which blamed baby boomers’ pinko liberalism for the 2008 financial debacle.

Trump’s long-standing friendship with the Clintons — extending to wedding attendances, political donations, golf outings, and island hoppings — was possibly a point of contention between he and Bossie, but they did agree on a shared mutual dislike of Barack Obama.

Fox ?s Bossie]

After it became clear Obama was going to secure the 2008 nomination, Bossie had pivoted from the litigation-pending Hillary: The Movie to a Citizens joint called Hype: The Obama Effect, which was somehow released less than two months before Election Day. Not only did it appear in small cinemas, but Citizens spent over a million dollars to insert 1,250,000 DVD copies into newspapers across the USA within a week of the election. Hype appears to compare Obama to Hitler by echoing scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, which Bossie confirmed was intentional. “There are no accidents in this film,” he said.

Floyd Brown, founder of Citizens United, also managed to engineer continued mainstream news coverage of accusations stating Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. Brown became chairman of WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah’s lesser-known far-right muckraking outfit, the Western Journalism Center (WJC), and together they spearheaded a well-funded effort to smear Obama by generating media & public discussion about Obama’s genealogy and country of birth. Founded in 1991, the WJC had previously funded high-profile “investigations” into the Clintons — conducted by Chris Ruddy, who went on to create conservative media powerhouse Newsmax in 1998—as an affiliate of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded Arkansas Project.

Is there a pattern to Floyd Brown’s attacks on Willie Horton & Barack Obama? (Src)]

Demands for publicly released copies of Obama’s birth certificate had made headlines since at least 2007, the same year Brown joined WJC, but it’s easy to imagine Bossie was a prime influencer prior to Trump’s sudden assault on Obama in March/April 2011. For six weeks, Trump climbed up on every soapbox he could find in order to spread the so-called “birther” angle, until Obama finally did release a certified copy in late April. Obama then went on to roast Trump to his face at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner mere days later, eliciting white-hot Donaldian rage.

It was widely assumed that Trump was attempting to leverage his birtherism rhetoric into a run at the 2012 GOP nomination — though any speculation was taken with a large grain of salt, after his many false starts over the previous several elections, most of which found Pat Buchanan and/or Roger Stone nearby — so it should be unsurprising that he had been consulting with the professional conspiracist Bossie during this time, and that Bossie was the one to first introduce Trump & Bannon. Despite Trump’s recent claim that he didn’t collaborate with Bannon until late in the 2016 campaign, the first time they worked together was in fact early 2011.

Trump ?s Bossie]

According to Bossie, the three of them quickly started drafting the image of a potential Trump presidential campaign and “how to build this thing out.” Those plans were formally paused a few weeks after Obama’s roasting landed a hard ego uppercut and showed he would be unbeatable in 2012, but Donald, David, and Steve continued to conspire & plot in the shadows.

Plans were sketched for what would ultimately lead to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy being headed by campaign CEO Steve Bannon and deputy campaign manager David Bossie, as behind the scenes and from multiple angles of attack, everything was quietly being forced into place.

Check out TEXTIFIRE’s next episode as this saga transitions into the digital age:

A Special Relationship & the Birth of Cambridge Analytica

Bridging the Atlantic to bring radical nativists of Trump & Brexit together via military tech & ad money, one donation…

medium.com

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-citizens-united-ruling-broke-american-democracy-at-the-start-of-the-decade-it-may-never-recover/

many lnx

The Citizens United ruling broke American democracy at the start of the decade. It may never recover

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon December 29, 2019

The election of President Donald Trump will likely define this decade, but the breakdown in our political system which sowed deeper partisan divisions and ultimately paved the way for his White House victory can be traced back to a single January day almost exactly ten years ago.

On Jan. 21, 2010, then-Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the deciding vote in the Citizens United case, which was brought by a group chaired by David Bossie, who would later serve as Trump’s deputy campaign manager.

Kennedy wrote in the majority decision that limits on independent expenditures violated the First Amendment rights of corporations and other groups, effectively overturning spending restrictions dating back more than a century.

The decision allowed corporations to spend unlimited money on campaign ads as long as they did not formally coordinate with candidates or political parties. According to Kennedy, there could not be corruption, because “an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

Some have argued that the ruling was the “logical next step” after the court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which said election spending limits may violate the First Amendment. But the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate limits in 1990 and then upheld limits on corporate and union spending in 2003.

The Citizens United ruling was later compounded by Republican efforts to block transparency rules, Federal Election Commission rulings and further court decisions like McCutcheon v. FEC, paving the way for the creation of super PACs, or committees which can spend unlimited sums of money to promote or oppose candidates while hiding the identities of their donors.

The impact of the Citizens United ruling and subsequent campaign finance changes are undeniable. In 2010, the biggest Republican donor of the election cycle spent $7.6 million to support conservative candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CPR). Just eight years later, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated $122 million to support GOP candidates, or more than 15 times as much.

Democrats pumped big money into elections, too. Presidential contender Mike Bloomberg spent $95 million during the last election cycle, while fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer spent more than $73 million, according to CPR data.

There was certainly loads of money pumped into elections prior to Citizens United. The 2008 presidential election, which was the last national contest before the Supreme Court decision, saw about $338 million in outside spending. But the amount of outside cash injected into the presidential race skyrocketed to more than $1 billion in 2012 and $1.4 billion in 2016.

Such massive expenditures are not limited to presidential races. The 2018 midterm election cycle was the first in history to see more than $1 billion in outside spending — up from $69 million just four cycles earlier and $567 million in 2014, according to the CPR.

Super PACs quickly became the biggest outside spenders. In 2018, the House Republican-linked Congressional Leadership Fund spent $136 million, the Senate Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC spent $112 million and the Mitch McConnell-connected Senate Leadership Fund spent $94 million, according to the CPR.

Though both parties have raised and spent hundreds of millions in outside money — and the Citizens United ruling has been criticized by both former President Barack Obama and Trump — researchers at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the London School of Economics and Political Science found that the rise of dark money has resulted in a huge advantage for Republicans in state legislature races, particularly in “states with weak unions.”

“We find that Citizens United increased the GOP’s average seat share in the state legislature by five percentage points. That is a large effect — large enough that, were it applied to the past twelve Congresses, partisan control of the House would have switched eight times,” the researchers wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “In line with a previous study, we also find that the vote share of Republican candidates increased three to four points on average.”

The result has been a shift much further to the right in numerous state legislatures and an increase in “ideological extremism,” which was more prevalent among Democrats, according to the study.

In the 2010 election, the first to see a massive upswing in outside money, Republicans captured two dozen state legislative chambers ahead of a game-changing nationwide gerrymandering effort, which made it harder than ever for Democrats to win back the seats they lost.

“Without Citizens United every frontline Congressional race of the last two cycles are TOTALLY different,” Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout tweeted. “A billion in outside spending in 2018. And that is just a tiny fraction of the impact.”

Despite Kennedy’s insistence that there could be no corruption because candidates cannot coordinate with super PACs, the ruling has also led to corruption as candidates flout rules preventing them from coordinating with the PACs.

“The supposed barrier between candidates and unrestricted super PACs is flimsier than ever,” Roll Call reported just four years after the ruling. “As midterm elections approach, complaints are rolling into the FEC from both parties about super PACs that share vendors, fund-raisers and video footage with the politicians they support.”

GOP leaders like Paul Ryan devised ways to solicit money directly from billionaires like Adelson by using go-betweens. The New York Times reported in 2015 that Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina had “aggressively” exploited loopholes to allow a super PAC to effectively run her campaign.

And the corruption is not merely limited to exploiting loopholes in the law. Obama warned in a State of the Union speech that the Citizens United ruling could lead to foreign interference in U.S. elections. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito could be seen mouthing the words, “Not true.”

But Obama’s foreshadowing turned out to be remarkably true. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two associates of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, were recently indicted on charges that they illegally funneled foreign money to Republican politicians, including a $325,000 contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC.

George Nader, an adviser to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who was linked to efforts to aid Trump’s campaign during the election, was also indicted for allegedly funneling $3.5 million into elections, including a $1 million contribution to a Democratic super PAC.

In 2012, a foreign-owned company made a $1 million contribution to a pro-Mitt Romney super PAC.

Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have premised their campaigns on driving big money out of politics. Sanders has long called for a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, which was echoed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and others at the party’s December primary debate.

But it may be nearly impossible to meet the high threshold to ratify a constitutional amendment. There has only been one amendment ratified since 1971. While House Democrats voted to approve H.R. 1, which called for the ruling to be repealed, there appears to be little to no support for the legislation from Republicans in the upper chamber.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have decried these efforts as attempts to “ban political speech.”

“In our view, the answer to that problem is to expand — not limit — the resources available for political advocacy. Thus, the ACLU supports a comprehensive and meaningful system of public financing that would help create a level playing field for every qualified candidate,” the organization said. “We support carefully drawn disclosure rules, we support reasonable limits on campaign contributions and we support stricter enforcement of existing bans on coordination between candidates and super PACs.”

Some local governments have tried to counter the rise of dark money with public financing. Seattle’s “democracy vouchers” give voters $100, which they can donate to any campaign in a local election. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has proposed a similar “Democracy Dollars” program, which would expand this initiative across the country.

But while cities, states and federal lawmakers grapple with the rise of dark money in politics, one thing that is clear is that Citizens United irrevocably changed politics over the course of the last decade — and beyond.

Kennedy himself admitted in 2015 that the disclosure requirement he believed would fix any potential issues of corruption was “not working the way it should.” FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel quit in 2017 over the state of campaign finance, writing in her resignation letter that “our political campaigns have been awash in unlimited, dark money” since the Citizens United decision.

“Most of the funding comes from a tiny, highly unrepresentative segment of the population,” she wrote. “Disclosure laws need to be strengthened, the broken jurisprudence of Citizens United re-examined, public financing of candidates ought to be expanded to reduce reliance on the wealthy and commissioners who will carry out the mandates of the law should be appointed.”

A Brennan Center report pointed out that a small wealthy group of Americans now wields “more power than at any time since Watergate, while many of the rest seem to be disengaging from politics.”

“This is perhaps the most troubling result of Citizens United: in a time of historic wealth inequality,” report author Daniel Weiner wrote, “the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.”

Citizens United 2.9 m$ since 1994, spike 2012

McDaniel, Chris (R-MS) $20,000

Amash, Justin (R-MI) $15,000

Shannon, T W (R-OK) $15,000

Comstock, Barbara (R-VA) $12,000

Barr, Bob (R-GA) 10K

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000024850&cycle=A

https://www.mainlinezine.com/the-golden-faucet-how-citizens-united-bought-and-sold-america/

no lnx

The Golden Faucet: how Citizens United bought and sold America

by Austin Adkins August 17, 2020

Every election year in America, political candidates discuss campaign finance laws and attack each other for taking money from special interest groups. Campaign ads paid for by independent organizations now appear on video streaming services, website pop-ups, and social media apps. As we draw closer towards the seemingly apocalyptic 2020 election, it’s important to recognize what these special interest groups are, how they are funded, and how they exert a powerful influence on American politics.

The most important recent development in campaign finance law is the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC, often referred to simply as “Citizens United”. Before we dig into this case and its shocking ramifications on contemporary political spending, it will be helpful to define a few important terms and get some background on the organization involved in the case. In this article, we will refer to the court case Citizens United in italics and its namesake organization in regular font.

Nonprofit: An organization that uses its revenue surplus to further a social cause rather than distributing earnings to members or shareholders. The term “nonprofit” can be somewhat misleading; nonprofits can still generate greater income than expenses, as long as they continue to reinvest that income in their cause rather than keeping it for its members. Most nonprofits are also tax-exempt, although certain political nonprofits may be subject to federal income tax depending on the exact status of their incorporation.

Political Action Committee (PAC): A specific type of tax-exempt nonprofit organization that collects campaign contributions and donates these funds to specific political campaigns or ballot initiatives. PACs arose from the labor movement during the 1940s to circumvent the restrictions on unions donating directly to political campaigns. They became more widespread after a series of campaign reform laws were passed in the 1970s that made it easy for corporations, trade associations, and labor unions to form their own PACs. Traditional PACS have strict limitations on how much money they can receive from individual donors and how much money they can directly donate to political candidates or parties. As we will see, the new “super PACs” that have risen since the Citizens United case are not bound by the same rules as traditional PACs.

Citizens United is a conservative political advocacy group (technically a 501(c) nonprofit and not a PAC, but more on that later) founded in 1988 by political consultant Floyd Brown. In 2000, David Bossie took over as the group’s chairman. Bossie was formerly a Republican congressional investigator tasked with looking into possible illegal campaign financing by Bill Clinton’s campaign, but he was forced to resign when it became clear that his team was publishing redacted documents that had been manipulated to further the Republican agenda against Clinton. Bossie is now known for his close relationship with Donald Trump; he served as Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016, and was the person responsible for introducing Trump to notorious political agitator Steve Bannon.

Under Bossie’s leadership, Citizens United became known for producing advertisements and documentaries attacking prominent Democratic candidates. In 2004, the group filed several complaints with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) claiming that TV advertisements for Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 were political advertising because of the film’s criticisms of President George Bush, and that therefore under federal restrictions at the time, they could not be shown during the 60 days before the 2004 presidential election. When the FEC denied their claims on the grounds that the film was a genuine commercially funded documentary and not a political expenditure, Citizens United produced the film Celsius 41.11 as a rebuttal to Moore’s film, explicitly attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times discussing Celsius 41.11, Bossie explained that the film was a “counterpunch” at Moore and bemoaned that “documentaries have become a weapon of the left.” Citizens United paid to distribute the film in theaters, but ironically, the FEC prohibited the group from advertising or showing it on TV during the two months leading up to the election. Since Citizens United was a political advocacy group and not a commercial filmmaker, the film broke the exact federal restrictions on independent political advertising for which they had attacked Farenheit 9/11.

Citizens United v. FEC

In 2008, Citizens United released a film called Hillary: The Movie attacking Hillary Clinton, who was at the time running against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. As the FEC planned to once again prohibit them from advertising or showing their film on TV in the weeks before the Democratic primary, Citizens United filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., challenging the constitutionality of the ban on corporate electioneering communications. When the District Court denied their complaint, the group appealed the case to the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn these independent campaign financing laws.

In January 2010, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of Citizens United in a controversial decision that opened the doors to unlimited corporate spending during elections. When issuing the court’s decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy claimed that the prohibition on independent advertising violated the First Amendment’s free speech clause and insisted that electioneering laws could be used to censor political opinions. The dissenting four justices rightfully worried that overturning these restrictions would lead to an influx of corporate money being used to drown out grassroots movements and buy elections. In his dissenting argument, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”

“Money isn’t speech and corporations aren’t people.”

Law professor David Kairys following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010. Source: Slate Magazine.

Bought and sold, indeed. In a 2010 article published in Slate Magazine a few days after the Citizens United ruling, law professor David Kairys perfectly summarized the problem with the court’s decision: “Money isn’t speech and corporations aren’t people.” Looking forward to how this influx of corporate cash would unfairly influence elections in the years to come, Kairys concluded, “Wealthy people and corporate managers shouldn’t dominate politics or have more and better speech rights than the rest of us. That seems like an obvious truth. And yet the Supreme Court’s recent decisions move us away from it.”

The Rise of Super PACs

While Citizens United opened the door to independent electioneering by corporations and other entities, it took a similar case that same year to really turn on the golden faucet of corporate cash that now dominates political spending. A few months after Citizens United, the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. voted unanimously in SpeechNow v. FEC to overturn the contribution limits that individuals and groups can make to independent PACs, so long as those PACs do not contribute directly to a candidate’s official campaign. This quickly led to the rise of “independent expenditure-only political action committees,” better known as super PACs.

Unlike traditional PACs, super PACs cannot donate directly to official political campaigns, but they have no donation limits for individual donors and no spending limits on their own independent advertising for political candidates or causes. So while a Super PAC still cannot directly coordinate with a candidate’s campaign or a political party, they can spend as much as they want on their own advertising supporting or attacking candidates.

You may have noticed a recent influx of ads promoting or attacking Trump or Biden that say “Paid for by [insert name of group here]”. Many of these are examples of super PAC spending; the candidates themselves do not have to spend a dime on these ads, and are not allowed to directly coordinate with the groups on them. Candidates get around this restriction by trying to promote their strategy as clearly as possible during media appearances and speaking directly to donors at fundraising events, providing super PACs with a trove of clips and soundbites to use in their ads. Super PACs function as well-oiled independent political advertising machines, flush with cash from wealthy donors and with no limit on how much they can spend in their attempt to influence an election.

The rise of super PACs has also led to some interesting debates among candidates about political spending. In the March Democratic debate earlier this year, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden threw jabs at each other, both claiming that the other was supported by super PACs. According to a FactCheck.org analysis of the debate, former Biden staffers set up a pro-Biden super PAC in 2019 that spent millions on ads for him during the primaries and continues to do so now for the general election. While a poorly worded Associated Press headline led social media users to believe otherwise, Sanders does not have his own super PAC; although, several other progressive nonprofits did either endorse Sanders or run independent advertising supporting him during the primaries. The pro-Sanders organizations included National Nurses United, Sunrise Movement, and as Sanders stated in a Meet the Press interview with Chuck Todd on Feb. 9, 2020, “immigration activists and civil rights activists.”

It is worth noting that almost all of the organizations that endorsed Sanders are not PACs, but grassroots nonprofit groups taking small donations from individuals, not large corporate interests. Sunrise Movement took to Twitter after the debate to declare Biden’s attack on them and other grassroots fundraising as a “smear,” stating that “comparing this to Joe Biden’s billionaire funded super PAC is ridiculous.”

Dark Money

Another equally problematic outcome of Citizens United was a massive increase in so-called “dark money” spending. Dark money groups are 501(c) nonprofit organizations such as social welfare groups, unions, and trade associations that are generally not required to disclose their donors, and because of the quarterly tax filing system, are usually able to delay any funding and spending disclosures until after an election has happened. Like super PACs, these groups can pay for political advertising, host fundraisers, and otherwise spend money from donors to influence elections. Unlike super PACs, these nonprofit groups are officially supposed to be “nonpolitical” in nature; in other words, they are legally required to use less than half of their spending on political campaigning. However, because these groups report to the IRS rather than the FEC, there are plenty of legal loopholes for them to exploit to circumvent this.

According to a 2014 Newsweek report on dark money, the IRS has “struggled to identify which organizations appeared to be spending more than the recommended 50% of their annual budgets on political activities — and even to define what ‘political spending’ was.” For example, the same individual or organization can create both a super PAC and a 501(c) nonprofit group, allowing them to move money around between the two groups to disguise the original source of the funds. It has also become common for wealthy donors and special interest groups to create a shell corporation specifically to disguise the source of their donations to dark money groups; the nonprofit may have to reveal the LLC’s donation in its quarterly tax filing, but tracing this back to the original donor can be extremely difficult.

Courtesy: The Sunlight Foundation

The most prominent example of this interplay between dark money groups and political spending is the Koch brothers. In the 2012 election, the Koch brothers raised over $400 million to influence the presidential election using a vast network of shell companies and conservative nonprofit groups to disguise the source of the donors. The public did not become aware of this until nearly a full year later, when reporters from Politico and the Center For Responsive Politics used tax documents to piece together a map of 17 different dark money groups backed by the Koch team. This kind of independent political fundraising was unheard of before the Citizens United case, and corporate spending funneled through dark money groups continues to grow with each election cycle.

For The People

According to a 2015 report by nonpartisan law and policy institute the Brennan Center, “This is perhaps the most troubling result of Citizens United: in a time of historic wealth inequality, the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few, and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value.”

In the years since Citizens United, progressives have repeatedly called for Congress to pass legislation that would reform campaign finance laws and limit independent campaign spending. In March 2019, the House passed the For The People Act, a bill designed to ensure full disclosure of all campaign spending and place tighter restrictions on independent advertising in elections. The bill also included voting reforms such as automatic voter registration and a ban on voter roll purges, a voter suppression tactic used prominently in Georgia by Gov. Brian Kemp’s administration to remove eligible voters from the system.

Unsurprisingly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to allow consideration of the bill in the Republican-controlled Senate because it would help restore a sense of balance and transparency to our broken, corrupt electoral system. As the influence of billionaire donors and corporate special interests continues to exert a stranglehold on American politics, overturning Citizens United will be a crucial first step towards electing a government that is truly by the people and for the people.

Tags: 2020 TURBULENCEBERNIE SANDERSCITIZENS UNITEDCITIZENS UNITED V. FECDARK MONEYJOE BIDENPROFIT OVER PEOPLESUNLIGHT FOUNDATIONSUPER PACSSUPREME COURTTHE BRENNAN CENTER

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/PROJECTS/FTRIALS/conlaw/CitizensUnitedBackground.html

Citizens United v FEC: Money, Corporations, and Politics

By Douglas O. Linder (2019)

Money has been called the mother’s milk of politics. Without money, there can be no campaign. Money is needed to buy advertising, to rent halls for rallies, to pay campaign staff, and to fly or drive candidates from one rally to the next.

Early in our history, campaigns had expenses we might find surprising today. James Madison probably lost his race for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 1777 because he refused to provide liquor at his rallies. Why go listen to James when his opponent is offering free rum? George Washington knew better. He won one election after serving roughly one half gallon of alcohol for every vote he earned.

According to Melvin Urofsky, author of the Money and Free Speech, it was the campaign of Andrew Jackson that ushered in the era of mass politicking. And it took off from there. By 1840, the presidential campaign of William Henry Harrison included rallies, parades with banners and floats, log-cabin songbooks and log-cabin newspapers, pictures of Harrison, and “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” handkerchiefs and badges. All of this, of course, cost money.

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln worried about the influence of corporate money in politics. Lincoln said, “As a result of the war, corporations have become enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its rule by preying on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is concentrated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

But the cost of campaigns continued to shoot up—and wealthy business owners were eager to help foot the bills. It cost $125,000 to get Lincoln re-elected in 1864. Eight years later, the Republican Party spent twice that much to elect Ulysses Grant. And it took about four times that much, close to a million dollars, to win the contested election of 1876 for Rutherford Hayes. By 1892, campaign costs had more than doubled again. Democrat Grover Cleveland spent well over $2 million to win election.

William McKinley’s campaign in 1896 rested on retaining the gold standard, a policy favored by big industries. McKinley’s chief fundraiser, Marcus Hanna, told industrial leaders how much they were expected to contribute. Banks were to pay one-quarter of 1% of their capital. Other industrial leaders were assessed flat fees. Standard Oil chipped in $250,000. Chicago’s meat-packing houses sent in $400,000. Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan got his own corporate sponsors, mainly the owners of silver mines in the West. McKinley won.

In response to the massive corporate funding of the McKinley campaign, four states enacted laws in 1897 banning all corporate contributions to political campaigns. All four states had voted for Bryan the year before.

McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, was the first president to call for an outright ban on corporate contributions. Roosevelt told Congress in 1905, quote, “All contributions by corporations to any political campaign or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.”

A few years later, Congress managed to pass the first federal campaign finance act. It was a toothless law called the “Publicity Act.” It required disclosure of major donors and limited the size of contributions. But the law lacked any enforcement mechanism. There would not be a single prosecution in the 46 years the Publicity Act remained on the books.

Campaign spending kept shooting skyward. And, increasingly, most of the money came from a relative handful of very wealthy people. In the 1928 Hoover-Smith race, for example, just 1% of givers gave fully half of the total raised. In the 1952 Eisenhower-Stevenson race, over two thirds of campaign funding came from donors giving more than $2500, as measured in current dollars.

In 1971 that Congress passed the first truly significant piece of campaign reform legislation. By then, television had changed politics. Among other things, it made races much more expensive. Senator Edward Kennedy said, “Like a colossus of the ancient world, television stands astride our political system demanding tribute from every candidate for public office. Its appetite is insatiable, its impact unique.” Television turned fund-raising into a nearly full-time job.

The Federal Election Campaign Reform Act was signed by President Nixon. It created a general taxpayer-paid fund for presidential elections, limited expenditures for media advertising, tightened reporting requirements, and imposed a ceiling on what candidates for federal office could spend on their own campaigns. Two years later, amendments to the law created the Federal Election Commission. Composed of three Republicans and three Democrats, serving 6-year terms. The amendments also set limits on individual contributions to campaigns.

The Reform Act became law largely for one reason. It favored incumbents. With the powers of their offices and their greater name recognition, they had an edge. With the law in place, they need not worry about millionaire opponents funding their own campaigns. Nor about opponents with unique fund-raising appeal.

The campaign reform act was challenged in court in January 1975. The challenge was brought by some odd political bedfellows. They included the liberal senator from Minnesota Eugene McCarthy and conservative senator James Buckley from New York. The ACLU and the American Conservative Union. Litigants from across the political spectrum.

They argued, first off, that money was speech. At least money donated to a political campaign or spent to further a campaign. Money spent, to say, buy a ticket to a play or football game would be conduct, not speech. Money for a campaign, they argued, is a form of political association protected by the First Amendment. Without money, no modern day campaign would be possible.

The government argued that even if the law restricted speech, it should be upheld. The law served to “level the playing field” and reduce the likelihood of corruption.

The Court gave both sides half a loaf. In Buckley v Valeo, the Court upheld the limit on individual contributions because a contributor’s money does not directly support the contributor’s free expression. It is the candidate, the recipient of the money, whose speech reaches the public. On the other hand, the law restricting the amount of money a rich candidate could spend on his or her own behalf was struck down. The candidate’s own expression was directly restricted. And besides, the Court said, a rich person can’t be corrupted by money that comes from himself.

Billionaires were freed to spend their billions. Good news for later self-funded candidates like Ross Perot.

From the 1980s on, donors increasingly exploited a large loophole in the campaign finance laws. The exclusion on limitations of so-called “soft money.” That is, not “hard money” given directly to a candidate for her campaign, but rather money given to a private entity—a “political action committee” or “PAC”—to spend in its own ways. PACs are required, theoretically, to spend their money in ways not coordinated with the candidate’s own campaign.

Soft money became the new thing. The new (some believed) corrupting influence in American politics. By the mid-1990s, the amount of soft money being spent on elections almost matched that of the campaigns themselves. PACs took many forms. There were labor union PACs, interest group PACs like the Sierra Club or NRA, and there were corporate PACs.

Scandals, fund-raising abuses, massive campaign expenditures—all of these led to another attempt at campaign finance reform. The result, in 2002, was a law formally known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. It is more commonly known by the name of two Senate sponsors, John McCain and Russ Feingold.

The McCain-Feingold Act did many things. It banned soft money contributions made directly to political parties. It imposed new limits on individual contributions of both soft money and hard money. Most importantly for our purposes, the law prohibited corporations and labor organizations from paying for any “electioneering communications” within 60 days of an election or 30 days of a primary.

President Bush put his signature on the legislation. But he did so reluctantly. There was no signing ceremony, no press conference in the Rose Garden.

On the day of the signing, Senator Mitch McConnell filed a suit challenging the new law’s constitutionality. Meanwhile, he worked to undermine the law. He did so largely by controlling the process of nominations to the Federal Election Commission. According to former commission Brad Smith, McConnell said, “We need to put Republicans on the FEC who favor our point of view on regulation.'” The new appointees essentially refused to enforce the law. The result was a number of 3 to 3 deadlocks on enforcement actions.

McConnell’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering paid off. But his legal challenge to McCain-Feingold didn’t fare so well. By a 5-to-4 vote in 2003, the Court upheld nearly the entire law. It was the high-water mark for campaign reform efforts. A day of sunshine for reformers.

But the precedent of McConnell v FEC did not last long. The Court soon decided to reconsider the Act’s key requirement prohibiting corporate “electioneering communications” around election time. The case was Citizens United v the Federal Election Commission. It became one of the most hotly debated cases of our time.

The case was heard by a newly remade Supreme Court. John Roberts and Samuel Alito joined the Court in President George W. Bush’s second term. The loss of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and her replacement by Justice Alito, made all the difference. When a case is decided 5 to 4, it only takes one vote to change it.

And here we make a brief digression. You might well be asking—and many people still are—how is it possible for a corporation to have First Amendment rights?

It turns out the Supreme Court decided long ago corporations were “persons” entitled to certain constitutional rights. In the 1888 case of Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, the Court said, quote, "Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a private corporation is included. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name.” Over the decades that have followed, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed this holding many times.

And free press fans should be happy that corporations do have at least some First Amendment rights. After all, the New York Times is a corporation. The Washington Post is a corporation.

Now, that doesn’t mean corporations necessarily have exactly the same First Amendment rights as individuals. McConnell v FEC proved that.

But to get back to our story. David Bosse watched Michael Moore’s political documentary “Farenheit 9-11” in 2004. It seems an unlikely choice for a conservative activist. But Bosse didn’t watch the movie for entertainment. He was doing research for Citizens United. Citizens United proclaims its mission to be to “reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security.” Citizens United receives some of its donations from corporations.

Although Bosse disagreed with just about everything in Michael Moore’s movie, he came away impressed. He said, “I saw its ability to drive discussion.” He began to think about making movies for Citizens United that pushed a conservative agenda. “I wanted to counterpunch,” he said.

He began by calling, he said, “Every friend in the conservative movement I knew.” Some were openly skeptical, others encouraging. Bosse said, “I’m just going to do it.” Even though, “I didn’t know the front of a camera from the back of a camera.”

Bosse’s first production was a movie called “Celsius 41.11.” It was a response to Moore’s film, both a tribute to George W. Bush’s war on terrorism and an attack on the 2004 Democratic candidate for president, John Kerry. The movie questioned Kerry’s anti-war record and attacked his qualifications for president. Celsius 41.11, by the way, according to film’s tagline, is "The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die."

The movie was put together in record time. It opened in Washington DC in late December and was shown in 116 theaters across the country for a three-week run.

Bossie had hoped to take out television ads promoting his movie. But there was a problem. The ads would run during the 60-day period before the general election. The McCain-Feingold law prohibited outside organizations and corporations from purchasing political ads on radio and television in the two months before elections.

Bosse’s film won a lot of praise from movement conservatives. His political friends called and said, “Wow, you need to do more like that.” Bosse didn’t need convincing. He saw the medium of film as a potentially powerful force for political change. You can put a movie on television and deliver it right into people’s living rooms. You can have 90 solid minutes or more to persuade and energize voters.

Two years after the success of “Celsius 41.11,” Bosse began thinking about making a movie about Hillary Clinton. At the time, she was considered the odds-on favorite to win the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. Bosse had worked in the 1990s for a House Committee that looked into the financial affairs of the Clintions. Bosse said, “Who knows more about Hillary Clinton than me? Very few people.”

Bossie recruited a “who’s-who” list of conservative commentators to appear as interview subjects in his film called “Hillary: The Movie.” People like Ann Coulter, Dick Morris, Robert Novak, Larry Kudlow, and Newt Gingrich. Kathleen Willey appeared to discuss attacks by the Clintons that resulted from her alleging a sexual assault by Bill Clinton.

None of the commentators had anything good to say about Hillary Clinton. The Clintons were described as “power hungry.” “They’ll stop at nothing,” one said. They were accused of covering up evidence of wrong-doing. One commentator described Clinton’s Presidential Library as “Little Rock’s Fort Knox.” Dick Morris said, “Hillary Clinton is the closest thing we have in this country to a European socialist.” The movie ends darkly with Morris saying, “We must never forget the fundamental danger that this woman poses to every value we hold dear. You see, I know her.”

The movie cost over one million dollars to produce. But Citizens United was worried. It suddenly appeared that the wheels were coming off Clinton’s campaign. She unexpectedly lost the caucuses in Iowa to Barrack Obama. If the movie didn’t come out soon, and Clinton’s campaign continued to fall apart, who would pay money to see the movie?

Bosse decided to release the movie as soon as possible—well ahead of when he originally intended. He quickly put together television ads promoting the movie’s release.

Citizens United knew full well that the ads would run afoul of restrictions in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. In fact, that was probably the point. Part of a strategy to undo McCain-Feingold.

Bosse and Citizens United argued they had a First Amendment right to advertise their movie anytime they wanted to, even during a campaign. Bosse objected to the FEC’s insistence that ads for the movie contain an explicit disclaimer. Bosse complained that the disclaimer would turn the spot into a political ad and detract from its effectiveness. “All I’m trying to do is make people pick up a movie ticket,” he said.

The FEC also said it would be an illegal campaign contribution for Citizens United to pay a cable company to make the movie available on video and demand. Moreover, if the combined gifts funding the movie exceeded $3000, all the donors’ names would have to be disclosed. In the view of the FEC, what Citizens United did was no different than if General Motors or Google made a movie favoring a particular candidate.

Citizens United filed suit against the Federal Election Commission. Bosse saw the FEC’s restrictions as a blatant First Amendment violation. “It’s the First Amendment,” he said. “The first one!”

The case was first heard by a panel of three federal district court judges. The court sided with the FEC. In the court’s view the movie was a 90-minute campaign ad arguing that Senator Clinton is unfit for office and that viewers should vote against her. The court held that the FEC correctly applied the McCain-Feingold law and that the law was constitutional.

Bossie and his legal team appealed directly to the Supreme Court. They hired a Dream Team of lawyers. Chief among them was Ted Olson, former solicitor general of the United States. He was joined by Citizens United counsel, Michael Boos, and Floyd Abrams, a highly respected First Amendment lawyer who worked on the Pentagon Papers case.

For Olson, the case was special. Citizens United had dedicated the movie “Hillary” to his wife, Barbara Olson. Barbara Olson was a conservative commentator who was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. She was also a Clinton critic and author of the book, "Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton."

In Bossie’s view, Ted Olson was "singularly responsible for our winning this case." Olson decided to transform the case from a narrow one challenging a few specific provisions of McCain-Feingold into an all-out assault on the law's constitutionality.

He argued that there McCain-Feingold law created a slippery slope that could lead to an evisceration of protection for crore political speech. He urged the Court to overturn the 2003 McConnell decision and free corporations to make whatever political pitches they chose to make.

Concern about the slippery slope was evident when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments. The attorney for the FEC, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, was asked if the government could ban the publication of a book if it mentioned a candidate for office within the election time frame.

Stewart said that it could. "That's pretty incredible," Justice Samuel Alito said.

Then came questions about electronic devices such as the Kindle. "If it has one name, one use of the candidate's name, it would be covered, correct?" Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked.

"That's correct," Stewart replied.

"It's a 500-page book, and at the end it says, 'And so vote for X,' the government could ban that?" Roberts asked.

This was too much for the Court’s conservatives. The government’s answers to the hypotheticals sent a chill down the Supreme Court," Bossie said. Bossie said the slippery slope argument turned justices against the FEC and in favor of Citizens United.

Stewart tried to argue for the FEC that the case should be decided on narrow grounds. There was no need to reconsider the large First Amendment question about the limitations on corporate speech. But it they did go there, the law should be upheld. Even direct regulation of political speech is permissible if the government can show a “compelling need” for the regulation. And preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption was a compelling justification.

But the majority was skeptical. Why should speech from corporations be more corrupting than speech from individuals? Can’t we trust citizens to decide the value of speech for themselves?

Citizens United had its five votes.

The opinion for the majority was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. He invalidated McCain-Feingold’s most contested provision. The provision that barred corporations from using their general treasury funds for express advocacy or electioneering communications. The law applied to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election.

Kennedy said that under the law, many forms of political speech became felonies. He gave some examples: “The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests; the National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban; and the American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech.”

Justice Kennedy began his analysis by noting, “The First Amendment has its fullest and most urgent application to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.”

He said it was well established that “political speech of corporations or other associations should not be treated differently simply because such associations are not ‘natural persons.’” Political speech is no less valuable, Kennedy said, when it “comes from a corporation rather than an individual.”

Kennedy described the censorship presented by the case as “vast in its reach.” He wrote, “The Government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.” And “the electorate [has been] deprived of information, knowledge and opinion vital to its function.”

Kennedy said what the government was doing through the McCain-Feingold law amounted to nothing less than “thought control.” Kennedy wrote, “The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

Whether the movie “Hillary” was fair or not was beside the point. The Court opinion notes, “Some members of the public might consider Hillary to be insightful and instructive; some might find it to be neither high art nor a fair discussion on how to set the Nation’s course; still others simply might suspend judgment on these points but decide to think more about issues and candidates. Those choices and assessments, however, are not for the Government to make.”

Kennedy concluded, “The First Amendment underwrites the freedom to experiment and to create in the realm of thought and speech. Citizens must be free to use new forms, and new forums, for the expression of ideas. The civic discourse belongs to the people, and the Government may not prescribe the means used to conduct it.”

The decision was ironical in one sense. Citizen United’s original objections to the law were the only part of the law that survived. The Court upheld McCain-Feingold’s disclaimer and donor disclosure requirements.

Justice Stevens wrote for the Court’s four dissenters. He called the decision “profoundly misguided.” He said he “emphatically dissented” from the Court’ principal holding. It threatened, he said, to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation and damage the Supreme Court as an institution.

Stevens called the decision “backwards in many senses.” He wrote, “It elevates the majority’s agenda over the litigants’ submissions, facial attacks over as-applied claims, broad constitutional theories over narrow statutory grounds, individual dissenting opinions over precedential holdings, assertion over tradition, absolutism over empiricism, rhetoric over reality.”

In the minds of the four dissenters, the strong “societal interest in avoiding corruption and the appearance of corruption” provided more than enough justification for regulating corporate expenditures on candidate elections.

Stevens concluded by calling the decision “a rejection of the common sense of the American people.” He noted that the need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government has been recognized since the nation’s founding. And that the corrupting potential of corporate electioneering has been a major concern “since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.” Stevens wrote, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

The conservative activists at Citizens United were thrilled with the ruling. Citizens United spent about $1.25 million in legal fees on the case -- so much, Bossie said, that it "makes you cry." But, he said, it was worth every dollar.

Just days after the Citizens United decision, a new president gave his first State of the Union speech. Near the end of the speech, President Barrack Obama had a few things to say about the decision. He said, “With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections." Obama added, “I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests or, worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people.”

Democratic lawmakers stood to cheer and applaud. In the second row of the House chamber, a justice of the Supreme Court had a different reaction. "Not true, not true," Justice Alito appeared to say, as he shook his head and furrowed his brow.

Spending soared in the first election after Citizens United. Spending in congressional races jumped 46 percent from the election before.

Fred Wertheimer had worked long and hard on the issue of campaign reform. Wertheimer called Citizens United “a disaster for the American people” and “the most radical and destructive campaign finance decision in Supreme Court history.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein compared the case to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. Ornstein said, “The Roberts court is going to go down in history in the same way Chief Justice Roger Taney and his court went down in history with Dred Scott.”

Senator John McCain had a warning. “I promise you, there will be huge scandals,” he said. “There’s too much money washing around, too much of it we don’t know who’s behind it, and too much corruption associated with that kind of money.”

Polls showed that over two-thirds of Americans supported a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United. Is that likely to happen? Constitutional amendments are hard. They are almost impossible without the broad support of both parties. Citizens United is likely to remain the law, whatever most of the public might think about it.

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