jan 1, 2010 - 2010 Citizens United v FEC
Description:
Ever since 1947, Corporations could not make independent expenditures which directly called for the election or defeat of candidates for federal office, and nor could they, since 1907, contribute to a campaign of a candidate for federal office. If they wished to support a candidate, they had to set-up a PAC which could solicit donations and then contribute to a candidate.
This Supreme Court ruling declared the first of these restrictions (being unable to call for the election or defeat of a federal candidate) to be unconstitutional on grounds that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, and that corporations, as a collection of individuals, possessed such rights. This overturned Austin v Michigan.
The 1907 ban on contributions to political parties and candidates from corporations was actually upheld, but this became redundant as the Court ruled that corporations and labour unions had a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on their own on political speech, with no restriction.
The Court, in short, ruled that corporations are people and that money is speech.
Justice Stevens wrote a long dissent to the ruling which ended: "At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. 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."
Added to timeline:
The History of Money in Politics
A history of the evolving law around the private and public ...
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