Citizens United v. FEC
Based on Wikipedia: Citizens United v. FEC
In 2008, a conservative nonprofit wanted to air a documentary attacking Hillary Clinton on satellite television during the presidential primaries. The government said no. That refusal set off a legal battle that would fundamentally reshape American politics, unleashing a flood of money into elections and igniting a debate about the nature of free speech that continues to this day.
The case was called Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission, and when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in January 2010, it didn't just answer a narrow question about one documentary. It struck down decades of campaign finance law and declared that corporations have the same free speech rights as individual citizens when it comes to political spending.
To understand how we got here, we need to go back to a Michael Moore film and a rather ironic complaint.
The Origins: Michael Moore and a Documentary Arms Race
In 2004, the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 9/11, a scathing critique of the Bush administration's response to the September 11th terrorist attacks. The film was a cultural phenomenon, grossing over $200 million worldwide and becoming the highest-grossing documentary in history at that point.
Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit advocacy organization, was not amused.
They filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, arguing that television advertisements for Moore's film constituted "electioneering communications" under a law called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as McCain-Feingold after its Senate sponsors. This law prohibited corporations and unions from paying for broadcast advertisements that mentioned a candidate by name within thirty days of a primary election or sixty days of a general election.
The complaint went nowhere. The Federal Election Commission found no evidence that any such advertisements had actually aired within those restricted time windows.
But Citizens United didn't give up. Instead, they decided to beat Moore at his own game. They produced their own documentary, called Celsius 41.11, which attacked both Fahrenheit 9/11 and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. This time, however, the government ruled against them. The Federal Election Commission said Citizens United couldn't show their film or advertise it because they weren't considered a legitimate commercial filmmaker.
This was the moment that changed everything. Citizens United decided they would establish themselves as a bona fide documentary production company. And they would do it in time for the next presidential election.
Hillary: The Movie
By 2008, Citizens United had produced several documentaries. Their newest project was called Hillary: The Movie, a ninety-minute film that was, to put it mildly, not a flattering portrait of Senator Hillary Clinton, who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The organization wanted to promote the film with television advertisements and make it available through DirecTV's video-on-demand service. But they knew they had a problem. Based on the government's previous decisions, they feared that both the advertisements and the satellite broadcast would violate the McCain-Feingold law. After all, here was a corporation paying to distribute a film that was explicitly critical of a candidate, right in the middle of the primary season.
Rather than wait to be told no, Citizens United went on offense. They filed a lawsuit in federal court, asking the judges to declare that the law prohibiting their spending was unconstitutional and to stop the Federal Election Commission from enforcing it.
The lower court wasn't sympathetic. In January 2008, a three-judge panel denied Citizens United's request, ruling that the movie was essentially an extended campaign advertisement against Hillary Clinton. There was, the judges wrote, "no reasonable interpretation" of the film other than as an appeal to vote against her. In July, the court officially ruled that the law prohibited Citizens United from paying to show the film on television within thirty days of the Democratic primaries.
Citizens United appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Question That Changed Everything
When oral arguments began in March 2009, something unexpected happened. The government's lawyer, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, was asked a hypothetical question: Under the logic of the campaign finance law, could the government ban a book?
Stewart's answer was yes. If a book contained content expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate and was published by a corporation, the government could prohibit it. The same would be true for a book distributed digitally through Amazon's Kindle device, or even a book that a union had hired an author to write.
The justices were stunned.
Justice Anthony Kennedy later explained that "all of us are concerned with money in politics." But he was shocked that the government had actually argued before the Supreme Court that it could stop the publication of a book simply because it criticized a political candidate and was produced by a corporation.
This admission changed the trajectory of the case.
Behind Closed Doors
According to a retrospective account by the legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin, the Supreme Court initially planned to rule narrowly. The question was simple: Could Citizens United show its movie? At the justices' private conference after oral arguments, the vote was five to four in favor of Citizens United. Chief Justice John Roberts began drafting an opinion that would have allowed the film to be broadcast without addressing the broader constitutional questions.
But Justice Kennedy had a different vision. He wrote a concurring opinion arguing that the court should go much further and strike down the entire framework of restrictions on corporate political spending. The other conservative justices agreed with Kennedy's reasoning, and they convinced Roberts to reassign the writing of the majority opinion to Kennedy.
Meanwhile, Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior justice among the dissenters, assigned the dissenting opinion to Justice David Souter. Souter's draft didn't just critique the majority's legal reasoning. According to Toobin, it accused Chief Justice Roberts of manipulating court procedures to reach his desired result, essentially engineering an opportunity to overturn decades of election law on issues that neither party to the lawsuit had even raised.
Roberts responded by withdrawing his opinion and ordering the case to be re-argued in September 2009, with new questions about whether the court should overturn its previous precedents on corporate political spending.
It was a remarkable turn of events. What had started as a case about a single documentary was now poised to reshape the entire landscape of American campaign finance.
The Decision
On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court issued its ruling. By a vote of five to four, the justices struck down the McCain-Feingold restrictions on corporate political spending as violations of the First Amendment's protection of free speech.
Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. His reasoning was sweeping. "If the First Amendment has any force," he wrote, "it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
The court's logic rested on several key principles.
First, the majority held that the First Amendment protects not just individual speakers but also associations of individuals. Corporations, they reasoned, are associations of individuals, and therefore have free speech rights. This principle had actually been established in earlier cases, but the court now applied it more broadly than ever before.
Second, because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money on political communications is the same as limiting speech itself. This connection between money and speech had been established in a 1976 case called Buckley versus Valeo, which struck down limits on campaign spending by candidates.
Third, the First Amendment does not allow the government to restrict speech based on the identity of the speaker. A corporation speaking about politics has the same constitutional protection as an individual doing so.
Kennedy also pointed out that the major newspapers and television networks are owned by corporations. Under the government's theory, Congress could prohibit these media organizations from running editorials supporting or opposing candidates. The First Amendment, he argued, cannot possibly permit such a result.
As for the concern that corporate money might corrupt politicians or create the appearance of corruption, the majority was skeptical. They argued that the only type of corruption serious enough to justify restricting speech was "quid pro quo" corruption—essentially, explicit bribery where a politician provides a specific favor in exchange for money. The mere possibility that politicians might be influenced by independent expenditures on their behalf was not enough.
"There is no such thing as too much speech," Kennedy wrote.
The Dissent
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a passionate dissent, which Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor joined. The dissent ran to ninety pages.
Stevens argued that the majority's ruling represented "a rejection of the common sense of the American people." He contended that corporations are fundamentally different from human beings. They don't have consciences. They can't vote. They were created by law for economic purposes, not political ones. Treating their spending as constitutionally protected speech equivalent to the speech of citizens was, in his view, a profound mistake.
The dissent also disputed the majority's narrow definition of corruption. Stevens argued that corruption encompasses more than outright bribery. The prospect that corporations might spend unlimited sums to elect friendly candidates—or defeat unfriendly ones—could fundamentally distort the democratic process, even without any explicit deals being made.
Perhaps most pointedly, Stevens criticized the majority for reaching out to decide constitutional questions that the parties had never raised. The original lawsuit was simply about whether Citizens United could show its movie. The court, he argued, had essentially manufactured an opportunity to overturn decades of precedent.
What the Court Preserved
Despite striking down the core restrictions on corporate political spending, the Supreme Court did uphold certain requirements in the McCain-Feingold law. Corporations and unions that make independent political expenditures must still disclose who is funding their communications. The funders of political advertisements must be identified.
The majority explained that this transparency serves important purposes. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation's political activities align with their interests. Citizens can see which elected officials are supported by particular interests. "This transparency," the court wrote, "enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages."
This distinction—between restricting speech, which the court struck down, and requiring disclosure, which it upheld—would prove significant in the years to come. However, various loopholes and subsequent developments have meant that disclosure in practice has often been incomplete.
The Immediate Reaction
The response to the Citizens United decision was swift and sharply divided.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in the Senate, praised the ruling as "an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights" of organizations that wish to participate in the political process.
President Barack Obama had a very different view. He said the decision "gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington." Days later, in his State of the Union address with six of the nine Supreme Court justices sitting in the audience, Obama declared that the ruling would "open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections." Justice Samuel Alito, one of the justices in the majority, was caught on camera shaking his head and appearing to mouth the words "not true."
That moment captured the intensity of the debate the decision had unleashed.
The Meaning of Corporate Personhood
The Citizens United decision is often described as establishing that "corporations are people." This is both an oversimplification and a reference to a legal doctrine with a much longer history.
Corporate personhood—the idea that corporations have certain legal rights similar to those of natural persons—dates back centuries in American law. Corporations can enter into contracts, sue and be sued, and own property. These rights make practical sense: without them, the basic operations of business would be nearly impossible.
What Citizens United did was extend this principle into the realm of political speech. The court held that when it comes to spending money to express political views, corporations have the same First Amendment protections as individuals. Critics argue this goes too far, treating artificial legal entities as equivalent to flesh-and-blood citizens in the political arena. Supporters counter that corporations are ultimately made up of people, and restricting corporate speech means restricting the speech of those people acting collectively.
This debate echoes a fundamental tension in democratic theory. On one side is the view that free speech means the government cannot pick and choose whose speech to allow based on the speaker's identity. On the other side is the concern that allowing wealthy entities to spend unlimited sums amplifies some voices so dramatically that it drowns out others, undermining the equality that democracy requires.
The Aftermath
The practical effects of Citizens United became apparent almost immediately. In the 2010 midterm elections, outside spending by groups not directly affiliated with candidates or parties roughly doubled compared to the previous midterm cycle. By 2012, it had increased several times over.
The decision enabled the creation of what became known as Super Political Action Committees, or Super PACs. While the Citizens United case itself dealt with direct corporate and union spending, a subsequent lower court case called SpeechNow.org versus the Federal Election Commission applied its logic to political action committees. The result was that groups could now raise unlimited funds from corporations, unions, and individuals, as long as they operated independently from candidates' campaigns.
The phrase "independent expenditure" became crucial—and contested. The law still prohibited corporations and unions from giving money directly to candidates or coordinating their spending with campaigns. But critics argued that the line between independent spending and coordination was often blurry in practice. A Super PAC run by a candidate's former staffers, funded by the candidate's major supporters, and promoting the candidate's message might technically be "independent," but the real-world distinction could seem like a legal fiction.
Defenders of the system argued that more political speech, from more sources, ultimately strengthens democracy by giving voters more information. They pointed out that individual citizens can still donate to causes and candidates they believe in, and that the disclosure requirements the court upheld allow voters to know who is funding political messages.
The Ongoing Debate
More than a decade after the Citizens United decision, Americans remain deeply divided over its legacy.
Those who support the ruling see it as a defense of fundamental First Amendment principles. The government, in their view, should not be in the business of deciding who can speak about politics and how much they can spend to make their voices heard. The alternative—giving the government power to regulate political speech—is, they argue, far more dangerous than whatever distortions might arise from corporate spending.
Those who oppose the decision see it as a catastrophic mistake that has corrupted American democracy. They argue that allowing unlimited corporate spending has given wealthy interests disproportionate influence over elections, drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens. They point to the billions of dollars now spent on each election cycle as evidence that the system has spun out of control.
Some critics have called for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision, though the difficulty of amending the Constitution makes this a long-term aspiration at best. Others have focused on strengthening disclosure requirements, reasoning that if unlimited spending cannot be prevented, at least voters should know who is funding political messages.
The debate also reflects deeper disagreements about the nature of corruption and the purpose of campaign finance regulation. Is corruption limited to explicit quid pro quo exchanges, as the Citizens United majority argued? Or does it include the more subtle ways that large contributions can shape politicians' priorities and access, even without explicit deals? These are not just legal questions but philosophical ones about how democracy should work.
A Question for the Future
The Citizens United case began with a simple dispute over a documentary about Hillary Clinton. It ended with a transformation of American campaign finance that continues to shape every election.
Whether that transformation represents the vindication of free speech or the corruption of democracy depends on which principles you believe should take priority. The debate pits two deeply held American values against each other: the commitment to free expression and the commitment to political equality.
Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, concluded with confidence that more speech is always better. Justice Stevens, in dissent, warned that the "common sense of the American people" understood something the court's majority did not: that money and speech are not the same thing, and that allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections threatens the very democracy the First Amendment was meant to protect.
That argument continues. In every election since 2010, in every campaign advertisement funded by outside groups, in every debate about the role of money in politics, the legacy of Citizens United lives on. It remains one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions of the twenty-first century—and one of the most contested.