Citizens United not destroying the U.S.

Published 9:40 pm Friday, February 14, 2014

Democrats are taking aim again at the U.S. Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, but they get some very basic facts wrong.

Reps. Nancy Pelosi and John Sarbanes (Democrats from California and Maryland, respectively) wrote a piece for the Washington Post last week claiming the decision “shook the foundation of our democracy.”

It did no such thing. Nor have any of the dire warnings of doom and plutocracy come true. The decision merely lifted some inappropriate limits on political speech.

“The narrow court majority, overturning decades of precedent, opened the floodgates to millions of dollars in secret, special-interest spending on elections,” Pelosi and Sarbanes claim. “Indeed, Citizens United shook the foundation of our democracy: the principle that, in the United States of America, it is the voices of the people, not the bank accounts of the privileged few, that determine the outcome of our elections and the policies of our government.”

That’s simply not true. First, there weren’t “decades of precedent.”

“Prior to Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990), the only restrictions on political speech upheld by the Court were those needed to avoid corruption or the appearance of corruption,” explains Evan Bernick of the Heritage Foundation. “In the seminal case of Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Court held that ‘equalizing the relative ability of individuals and groups to influence the outcome of elections’ is not a justification for restricting independent political speech. The Austin Court departed from Buckley and numerous other cases in upholding a Michigan ban on independent corporate expenditures on the grounds that the state had a ‘compelling interest’ in ‘eliminat[ing] the distortion caused by corporate spending,’ even absent corruption.”

The Austin decision went too far, the Court found in Citizens United.

“In overruling Austin, and striking provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which generally prohibited corporations and unions (except for media corporations) from making independent expenditures on federal elections, the Citizens United Court affirmed principles that are as old as our republic,” Bernick says. “The Constitution does not allow the government to deprive people of their right to speak when they associate or discriminate between the institutional press and other speakers.”

Pelosi and Sarbanes base their shrill claim on the idea that money itself is the evil in politics.

“Most people who run for public office do so out of a sincere desire to help others and make a difference in their community and in our country,” they wrote. “Many of us are deeply frustrated at the huge amounts of money it takes to run for office and the distorting effect money has on the functioning of government.”

Here, too, they’re wrong. James Madison said it best.

“It could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction than it would be to wish the annihilation of air…because it imparts to fire its destructive agency,” he wrote in the Federalist Papers.

Calls to reverse Citizens United are nothing less than calls to restrict political speech.