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The five-justice conservative majority, which has flexed its ideological muscle in many areas in recent years, had been moving toward greater limits on government power to regulate campaign money. Thursday's decision, blurring legal distinctions between corporations and individuals and highlighting free political speech, is the most significant to date.
It outright reverses the 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and portions of the 2003 case of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, both of which had upheld government limits on corporate expenditures.
Thursday's case originally had come to the justices as a narrow challenge to Citizens United's offering of Hillary Clinton: The Movie. The conservative non-profit corporation had sought to sell the movie attacking then-presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 election season through a TV video-on-demand service. The justices ratcheted up the stakes last June when they said they would use the case to re-examine the past rulings allowing regulation of corporate spending in races.
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"The court's blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve," Stevens wrote.
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At the same time, Kennedy also noted that since the late 19th century, states and the federal government have banned direct corporate contributions to candidates. It was not until 1947, he said, that Congress first prohibited independent expenditures by corporations and labor unions. The validity of regulation beyond independent corporate spending, such as bans on direct contributions to candidates, would rest on future litigation.
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