Page:Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.pdf/4

4 Rh   preferred speakers. There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers. Both history and logic lead to this conclusion. Pp. 20–25.

(b) The Court has recognized that the First Amendment applies to corporations, e.g., ''First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765, 778, n. 14, and extended this protection to the context of political speech, see, e.g., NAACP v. Button'', 371 U.S. 415, 428–429. Addressing challenges to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, the Buckley Court upheld limits on direct contributions to candidates, 18 U.S.C. §608(b), recognizing a governmental interest in preventing quid pro quo corruption. 424 U.S., at 25–26. However, the Court invalidated §608(e)'s expenditure ban, which applied to individuals, corporations, and unions, because it "fail[ed] to serve any substantial governmental interest in stemming the reality or appearance of corruption in the electoral process," id., at 47–48. While Buckley did not consider a separate ban on corporate and union independent expenditures found in §610, had that provision been challenged in Buckley's wake, it could not have been squared with the precedent's reasoning and analysis. The Buckley Court did not invoke the overbreadth doctrine to suggest that §608(e)'s expenditure ban would have been constitutional had it applied to corporations and unions but not individuals. Notwithstanding this precedent, Congress soon recodified §610's corporate and union expenditure ban at 2 U.S.C. §441b, the provision at issue. Less than two years after Buckley, Bellotti reaffirmed the First Amendment principle that the Government lacks the power to restrict political speech based on the speaker's corporate identity. 435 U.S., at 784–785. Thus the law stood until Austin upheld a corporate independent expenditure restriction, bypassing Buckley and Bellotti by recognizing a new governmental interest in preventing "the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of [corporate] wealth ... that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation’s political ideas." 494 U.S., at 660. Pp. 25–32.

(c) This Court is confronted with conflicting lines of precedent: a pre-Austin line forbidding speech restrictions based on the speaker's corporate identity and a post-Austin line permitting them. Neither Austin's antidistortion rationale nor the Government's other justifications support §441b's restrictions. Pp. 32–47.

  The First Amendment prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for engaging in political speech, but Austin's antidistortion rationale would permit the Government to ban political speech because the speaker is an association with a corporate form. Political speech is "indispensable to decision 