---

By Laurence Gold, a lawyer with Lichtman, Trister & Ross, PLLC in Washington, DC

---

Today or soon the Supreme Court will decide Citizens United v. FEC and, possibly, hold that the government cannot prohibit nonprofit advocacy corporations - and perhaps also business corporations and unions - from using their regular treasury accounts (and not just their individual-funded federal PACs) for explicit "vote-for" and "defeat"-type electoral messages to the general public. If the Court does that, then no person or group - except, possibly, foreign nationals - could be precluded from undertaking so-called "express advocacy" "independent expenditures" about federal or state candidates.

Much commentary on the case overstates how significantly that holding - overruling the Court's 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce decision - would change constitutional law. The First Amendment already empowers businesses, nonprofit corporations, unions and other groups to publicly convey all but the most explicit election-influencing messages, and further protects their issue advocacy and lobbying. And, as a practical matter, corporations, unions and other groups only episodically exercise their substantial electoral communications rights, due to budgetary pressures, institutional culture, averseness to controversy, federal tax disincentives and sensitivity to shareholder, member and public opinion. Those constraints won't disappear.

Progressives would do well to pay equal attention to what might happen if the Government wins this case. Rather then simply trying to preserve the status quo, the FEC and its amici - groups that lobby for more campaign finance regulation - are urging the Court to dramatically reduce First Amendment protections for independent speech. They argue that independent political speech can be outlawed on the theory that it "corrupts" candidates and officeholders because it is intended to "curry favor" with them and might cause them to "feel indebted." But the Court has consistently rejected that as a rationale to restrict speech, as distinct from political contributions that plainly risk a quid pro quo - the purchase of official favors - and only indirectly implicate free-speech interests.

It would be distasteful enough if politicians' "feelings" could trump group free-speech rights in the electoral sphere. But it is hard to discern how even non-electoral speech that discusses public officials could avoid the same fate. Although the Government has backed off from its previous contentions in Citizens United that federal election law can ban books, its First Amendment posture in the case remains aggressively censorial.

Citizens United also implicates important First Amendment questions about the relative electoral speech rights of different kinds of groups, but public commentary on the case has all but ignored them. Since the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, federal campaign finance law has largely equated unions and other nonprofits with business corporations, restricting them all in much the same ways. This has hardly created a "level playing field." Under current law, billionaires can make unlimited express-advocacy independent expenditures using wealth transferred from their businesses. And, despite their own commercial interests, huge media corporations - including those owned and controlled by non-media corporations - are exempt from political-speech restrictions, yet they profoundly influence public perceptions of candidates and officeholders and routinely editorialize explicitly for their favored candidates. Progressives should reject these disparities and seek comparably unfettered electoral-advocacy rights for unions and other nonprofits at least.

The Government defends Austin in part by arguing that shareholders need protection from corporate political spending that they do not authorize. Perhaps the Court will accept that as a constitutionally sufficient rationale to ban business express advocacy, but it has no application to nonprofits, which lack shareholders and are often membership-controlled. Austin itself explicitly acknowledged that its shareholder-protection rationale does not apply to unions, which - unlike most other kinds of groups - are always democratically run by their members, and whose represented workers always may forgo financing union political activities and lobbying.

In Citizens United, however, the government endorses speech restrictions on unions in order to prevent "the use of compulsory union dues for political purposes" - a startling echo of National Right to Work Committee propaganda. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disputed this equation of union members with shareholders during September's Citizens United argument, prompting Solicitor General Elena Kagan to admit that Justice Ginsburg was "right about that." But Ms. Kagan insisted that the "anti-corruption" rationale justifies criminalizing independent union political speech.

Maintaining restrictions on business express advocacy instead might require revisiting some very old constitutional doctrines that treat business corporations are "persons" with constitutional rights. Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested as much at the argument, but that prospect seems remote. Meanwhile, imposing speech restrictions on businesses in order to enhance other political voices has been a constitutional non-starter since Buckley v. Valeo in 1976; even Austin rejected that notion, and the Government eschews it in Citizens United.

Plainly, then, the Court's rationale in Citizens United for upholding or overruling Austin (if it doesn't duck it entirely, another possibility) will be as, if not more, important than its immediate disposition of current electoral-speech restrictions. And, that ruling's implications for the constitutional future of politics and advocacy will merit as close consideration as its practical consequences for the intense election year that looms ahead.

[Image via [nati].]

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) has sputtered in removing hurdles to voter registration and the Obama administration and state election officials must renew their efforts to bolster the law, writes Estelle Rogers in an Issue Brief released by ACS.

Congress passed the NVRA, in part, to increase voter registration and to prod government to encourage voting. When it was enacted, the NVRA was "heralded as a landmark law that would usher in a new era of universal or nearly universal, enfranchisement and political participation," Rogers states in "The National Voter Registration Act: Fifteen Years On."

But Rogers, the consulting attorney at Project Vote, maintains that while the law has produced some successes, it is hobbled by poor implementation and execution of some its key provisions.

Rogers writes:

Without question, the least successful provision of the NVRA is the requirement that social service agencies and offices serving the disabled provide voter registration services similarly to motor vehicle offices. While this requirement was a promising way of reaching out to citizens who didn't interact with DMVs, such as those too impoverished to drive or own cars, the reality has not measured up to the promise. This disappointing track record is due to widespread non-compliance with the mandates of Section 7 and a failure of enforcement by the Department of Justice, particularly in recent years, not with any lack of clarity in the statute itself.

Section 8 of the NVRA states, "Each state shall insure that any eligible applicant is registered to vote ... and conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters." But Rogers, says that provision has also been hampered by officials.

"The registration administration provisions of Section 8 are, for the most part, drafted clearly but nevertheless have been widely ignored," she writes. "Significantly increased awareness and enforcement of these provisions is necessary to fulfill the potential of Section 8."

Federal and state officials' leadership is needed to improve the NVRA, Rogers maintains. The Justice Department, in particular, must "provide much needed guidance and enforcement of sections 7 and 8." And state election officials, she writes, must aggressively approach "their responsibilities under the NVRA." For example, Rogers says that states' top election officials should ensure that election administrators "do not impose unreasonable restrictions on registration drives, and that motor vehicle, disability, and social service agencies consistently fulfill their duties under NVRA."

Download a pdf version of Rogers' Issue Brief here and for additional analysis of the law, see her ACS guest blog here. 

---

By Bert Brandenburg, Executive Director, Justice at Stake

---

This spring, in Caperton v. Massey, the Supreme Court said that due process required a West Virginia Supreme Court justice to step aside from a case involving a supporter who'd spent $3 million to help elect him. But the 5-4 majority left minimal guidance to the states, inviting them to fill in the blanks through state court rules.

First answers are coming from the Midwest, where divided courts have recently taken Caperton in different directions. Wisconsin's high court rejected proposals to require recusal when campaign spending reached a fixed "trigger" level. The proposal was sparked by record-breaking cash washing through the state's last three Supreme Court contests.

But the court's 4-3 majority took a far more radical step, approving requests from two of the state's most powerful players-the Wisconsin Realtors Association and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce-that no contribution or independent expenditure, no matter how large, could ever be the sole basis for recusal. In other words, if Bernie Madoff had spent $100 million to elect a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, a victim suing him for redress couldn't point to the support and ask the justice to abstain.

In Michigan, the state Supreme Court moved forward instead of backward. A 4-3 majority began by agreeing that a judge should be disqualified when "the judge's impartiality might objectively and reasonably be questioned" -- catching Michigan up with the vast majority of other states that have adopted this standard.

The Wolverine State's Supreme Court went further, adopting a first-in-the-nation provision that a litigant who fails to convince a justice to recuse may appeal to the entire high court (which would have to spell out its reasoning when it decided). "Times are changing and we're becoming increasingly aware of the impact a refusal to disqualify has on the public," said Chief Justice Marilyn Kelly.

Indeed, as spending on high court elections has more than doubled over the last decade, recusal has become a hot issue. Three in four Americans believe that campaign cash influences courtroom decisions. Caperton reaffirmed that this cash matters, and that every state must guarantee litigants a fair trial with due process, including in cases that involve major campaign spenders. And states are very much allowed to set rules that are tougher than the minimum required by constitutional due process requirements.

Since courts typically draft their own recusal standards, watchful eyes are on states like Nevada and Washington, which are now reviewing their rules. But judges don't always get the last word. In Wisconsin, just a week after the high court's retreat, legislators passed a system for public financing of judicial elections -- a reminder that impartial justice is everyone's business.

While Democrats swept congressional races yesterday (CA-10 and NY-23) and Republicans monopolized gubernatorial elections (New Jersey and Virginia,) the march towards LGBT equality may be the most notable storyline of Election Day, 2009.

In the most-watched race concerning LGBT rights, Maine voters repealed marriage equality legislation 53 percent to 47 percent. Equality advocates had hoped that Maine's libertarian streak -- which powered a medical marijuana initiative's passage 60 percent to 40 percent -- would contribute to their success as well. In the end, however, Maine became the 31st state in which voters rejected marriage equality.

On the northern tip of the other coast, Washington State voters appear to have endorsed legislation granting domestic partnership rights to same-sex couples. Referendum 71 was placed on the ballot by opponents of Washington's "everything but marriage" law, passed earlier this year in Olympia. "Sources differ as to whether the race has officially been called or not, but it appears that Referendum 71, which expands domestic partner rights to an everything-except-marriage standard in Washington, will be Approved," writes Nate Silver. "The initiative leads by only about 22,000 votes right now, but about a third of the outstanding vote is from Seattle's King County, which supports it heavily."

Voters in Kalamazoo, Mich., also approved protections for LGBT persons' rights, passing Ordinance 1856 by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent. The ordinance makes it illegal to discriminate against people for their sexual orientation or identity in the housing market.

There were also a number of openly gay and lesbian candidates who performed well yesterday. Annise Parker won a plurality in Houston's mayoral election, and heads into a run-off with a strong hand. Death penalty defense lawyer Mark Kleinschmidt claimed victory in the Chapel Hill, N.C. mayoral race. And Charles Pugh captured the most votes in Detroit's city council elections, making him the new city council president.

There are a number of elections across the country tomorrow, but advocates for LGBT equality will be closely watching three in Maine, Washington State and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

In light of the state's early voting law, Maine voters are already determining whether to repeal the state's marriage equality law. The Maine legislature embraced marriage equality in May, which promptly garnered the governor's signature before being placed on the ballot by opponents who, The Washington Post reports, "draw[ ] heavily from the effort that a year ago overturned a California Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage." The race in Maine is unpredictable, according to FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, but he still offers odds on the rejection of Question 1; the chances of marriage equality remaining the law of land in the "Dirigo" state are five-to-two, says Silver

Washington State voters are also considering the repeal of LGBT rights legislation. As reported by The Associated Press, the march towards LGBT equality in the Evergreen State has been slow and steady. The latest expansion of LGBT rights is the target of Referendum 71, which would repeal the "everything but marriage" law passed by Washington's legislature and signed by Governor Christine Gregoire earlier this year. Polling has been trending positively for equality rights supporters, according to the AP.

And in Kalamazoo, equality advocates are pulling for Ordinance 1856, which would outlaw discrimination against LGBT persons in the housing market. Polling in this city race is scant, but the debate has heated up recently with what the Courage Campaign calls "transphobic door hangers and fliers, and now radio ads that falsely suggest that criminal behavior will become legal when this simply isn't true." 

 

On Thursday, September 24, 2009 ACS hosted its annual preview of the Supreme Court’s new term, which opens October 5, 2009. A diverse panel of constitutional law experts and litigators highlighted some the Court’s most pressing cases and issues, including the scope of habeas corpus review, limits of police questioning after a right of counsel has been invoked, the ability to challenge the constitutionality of a religious display on public property, and whether the First Amendment limits government regulation of videos depicting animal cruelty. The panelists also discussed unfolding trends on the high court and Justice Sotomayor’s potential to shape those trends.

The panel featured Thomas C. Goldstein, Partner, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP; Michael A. Carvin, Partner, Jones Day; Pamela Harris, Executive Director, Supreme Court Institute at the Georgetown Law Center; Doug Kendall, Founder and President, Constitutional Accountability Center; Lisa Kung, H. Lee Sarokin Director, Southern Center for Human Rights; Deanne E. Maynard, Partner, Morrison & Foerster LLP; Paul M. Smith, Partner, Jenner & Block LLP.

On September 9, 2009, the Supreme Court re-heard oral argument in Citizens United v. FEC. Brenda Wright, of Demos, The narrow question originally presented by the case was whether an on-demand video showing of an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary during the 2008 election could be regulated as a political advertisement under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) because the sponsor -- a conservative non-profit group called Citizens United -- wanted to use for-profit corporate funds to help pay for the airing. That narrow question has been virtually obliterated by the Court's order at the end of last Term inviting briefing on whether Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC should be overruled. " summarized the issues in the case as follows: 

The narrow question originally presented by the case was whether an on-demand video showing of an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary during the 2008 election could be regulated as a political advertisement under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) because the sponsor -- a conservative non-profit group called Citizens United -- wanted to use for-profit corporate funds to help pay for the airing. That narrow question has been virtually obliterated by the Court's order at the end of last Term inviting briefing on whether Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC should be overruled.  

"Corporations have free speech, but they can't speak like you and me," Stephen Colbert explains in the video below, implicitly arguing in favor of reversing Austin and McConnell.  "They don't have mouths or hands. Instead, ... they must speak in the only way they can: through billions and billions of dollars."

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Let Freedom Ka-Ching
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

---

By Bert Brandenburg, executive director, Justice at Stake; For more information on Citizens United v. FEC see Justice at Stake's Gavel Grab.

---

Just three months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court reached a historic conclusion in Caperton v. Massey. The majority held that the Constitution sets limits on how much special interests can tilt the scales of justice, by requiring judges to step aside in certain case involving their supporters.

Just three months later, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance case argued today, has seemed to float in an alternate universe.

Citizens United today painted our nation's biggest political spenders as victims, barred and even "chilled" by unfair laws from participating in the political marketplace - echoing pretrial briefs by the group and its amicus backers.

In the real world of electioneering, that's a hard argument to buy. Whatever ails our nation's political system, it is not a shortage of special interest spending.

Justice at Stake is one of 40-plus groups to file an amicus brief in Citizens United, and one of a smaller number also to have filed in Caperton v. Massey. A comparison of the cases is revealing. While Caperton focused on the courts, its gritty facts should strip away any glossy illusions about what will happen if corporate and union treasuries are turned into private campaign war chests.

Even after state Supreme Court elections already had turned into a special interest arms race, coal executive Don Blankenship spent $3 million to elect a West Virginia Supreme Court judge, while appealing a $50 million jury award against his company. The newly elected justice voted to overturn the award. 

Now consider some of the central arguments put forward by the deep pockets hovering around Citizens United:

• Corporate spending has no undue or distorting impact on elections. "As an initial matter," says the Citizens United brief, co-authored by Citizens United attorney Theodore B. Olson, "there is simply no evidence that corporate and union independent expenditures have a ‘corrosive and distorting effect[' on the election process."
• Requirements to raise money through political action committees are an unfair burden that deny many corporations a voice (Chamber of Commerce brief, echoed frequently today by Justice Antonin Scalia, who noted that the "vast majority" of corporations are small).
• Any restriction on campaign speech violates the First Amendment. As a brief by eight former FEC members said: "The pristine simplicity of the First Amendment's proscription of any law abridging speech ... now is replaced by a flood of complex restrictions. ... Core political activity is chilled." Olson revisited this issue today, raising the specter of small groups being charged with felonies.

Each of these arguments pales in the face of the fact pattern that generated Caperton, and has arisen again and again in state court and other elections in the past decade.

In Caperton - which involved an independent TV ad blitz, not Citizens United's video-on-demand documentary - the threat to government integrity was not just an issue, but the issue. Olson, then representing appellant Hugh Caperton, said bluntly: "The improper appearance created by money in judicial elections is one of the most important issues facing our judicial system today."

Similarly, as Solicitor General Ellen Kagan noted in her brief, it is "simply wrong" to say the ban on corporate treasury spending in any way limits the ability of companies to join the election debate. Corporate PACs, where contributions are voluntarily made by individual executives and employees, have spent literally billions on election campaigns-hardly in keeping with the image of hairdressers and local car dealers that Scalia more than once invoked.

Finally, the absolutist First Amendment argument that is underpinning a full-scale assault on all campaign finance laws: Any rule that chills, or even could chill, specific spending decisions must be struck down.

More than once, the Constitution states competing rights in absolute terms. A "pristine" reading of one passage ignores the tradeoffs needed to protect competing rights and needs in a functioning democracy. A good example is the right to cast a secret ballot. The First Amendment right to lobby voters stops 40 feet short of the polling station. Likewise, bribery has no free-speech protection.

In the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court examined campaign finance law and the First Amendment when Watergate was still a fresh memory. As the Court said with simple eloquence: "The problem is not an illusory one."

The court found most of the post Watergate campaign laws consistent with the First Amendment. Contribution limits were a legitimate tool in fighting corruption. Campaign disclosure rules, even for so-called independent campaigns, also fought corruption, by informing the public of who was "paying to play."

One of the most fascinating disconnects between the Citizens United and Caperton hearings involved the issue of independent expenditures-ad campaigns run by third parties that have been given a protected status since Buckley v. Valeo. Olson opined in today's Citizens United hearing that with independent groups, "there is less of a threat of corruption because there is no quid pro quo." That reasoning may have seemed plausible in 1976, but not today. Independent ad campaigns are an enormous business.

The Caperton case, where Olson took the opposite side, involved almost entirely independent spending. Although Blankenship gave only $1,000 directly to the West Virginia justice, and spent $3 million on independent ads, Olson was clear in March that such a large expenditure did have an impact on the elected official. Olson, rightly in the Caperton case, said even an independent expenditure on this scale created a "probability of bias" on the justice's part, that required his removal. It's hard to square the two arguments.

After today's hearing, Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) said they were openly disturbed by many of the justices' questions. "I was rather disappointed by the judges' apparent naivete about the effects of corporate and union money on the election process," McCain said. Added Feingold, "The idea that in the era of AIG and Exxon, we would allow corporate treasuries to destroy the political process, it seems like a very bizarre time to consider that."

The corporate treasury ban is our nation's oldest limit on federal election spending-passed in 1907, when government was seen as dominated by the "trusts."

In recent years, polls reveal a similar taint enveloping state courts: three Americans in four believe campaign cash affects courtroom decisions. If the federal ban is struck down, similar state laws will be next.

If anyone wonders whether that will have a real-world effect, they should look at Caperton once more and ask this: What if Don Blankenship, the coal executive with litigation in West Virginia, hadn't been forced to spend from his own pocket? What if he could have just cut a company check to underwrite an election? And what if an unwise ruling makes that the norm, not the exception?

---

By Brenda Wright, Director of Democracy Program, Demos

---

The Supreme Court's unusual September 9 re-argument session for Citizens United v. FEC is about as dramatic a kick-off to the Supreme Court's term as Court-watchers have ever seen. Doug Kendall has ably explained key reasons why it's a blockbuster case.

Here is a little more background highlighting what's at stake.

The narrow question originally presented by the case was whether an on-demand video showing of an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary during the 2008 election could be regulated as a political advertisement under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) because the sponsor -- a conservative non-profit group called Citizens United -- wanted to use for-profit corporate funds to help pay for the airing. That narrow question has been virtually obliterated by the Court's order at the end of last Term inviting briefing on whether Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC should be overruled.

Austin and McConnell both upheld restrictions on political spending by for-profit corporations using corporate general treasury funds. So now the case is not about a feisty ideological non-profit and its political speech. It's about whether Countrywide Financial Services, Wal-Mart and Exxon must have the same right as individual citizens to make unlimited political expenditures in support of or in opposition to candidates for office. 

Austin, decided in 1990, upheld a Michigan law that prohibited corporations from using general treasury funds for independent political expenditures supporting or opposing candidates for elective office, but permitted corporations to set up and administer special segregated funds for political expenditures to which shareholders or officers could contribute voluntarily. McConnell, decided in 2003, relied on Austin to uphold BCRA's limits on corporate or union-funded broadcast ads in candidate elections. Overruling those cases would mean that corporate political spending no longer needs to be funded by voluntary, intentional donations from shareholders or officers who actually support the corporation's political activity, but instead could come directly from the corporate general treasury.

If the Court takes that step, perhaps it should do so by making an announcement in the style of Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in Austin: "Attention all corporate executives in America: as partial thanks for the economic meltdown the country has just experienced, please roll up your sleeve, put your hand in the corporate treasury and pull out as much as you like for political spending on behalf of your favorite candidates." After all, what could possibly go wrong from putting corporations in charge of politics?

Some who would like to see Austin and McConnell overruled seem to recognize that the timing is a bit awkward for Lochner-style arguments urging the judiciary to overturn democratic regulation of the boundary between the political marketplace and the economic marketplace. So they argue that removing all restrictions on corporate independent expenditures might not have much of an impact. Richard Epstein, for example, suggests in Forbes that "corporate realities and market constraints" will prevent any adverse outcomes if corporate general treasury funds are unleashed for political spending. Corporations, in other words, will police themselves and exercise restraint.

The history of campaign finance (not to mention American history in general) provides little support for such rosy thinking. The FEC's soft-money exemption allowing unlimited donations to political parties by corporations and unions as well as individuals saw exponential growth once political actors figured out the potential. As the opinion by Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra O'Connor in McConnell notes, in 1984, soft-money donations accounted for only 5% ($21.6 million) of the two major parties' total expenditures, but in 2000 -- just four presidential election cycles later -- they accounted for 42% of the parties' spending ($498 million).

The general treasury funds of large corporations entirely dwarf the existing resources available for political expenditures, and thus will provide a virtually irresistible target for political actors clawing for advantage in federal elections. The Solicitor General's supplemental brief in Citizens United explains:

During the 2007-2008 election cycle . . . FEC-registered political parties spent $1.5 billion, and federal PACs spent $1.2 billion, while the Fortune 100 companies had combined revenues of $13.1 trillion and profits of $605 billion. If those 100 companies alone had devoted just one percent of their profits (or one-twentieth of one percent of their revenues) to electoral advocacy, such spending would have more than doubled the federally-reported disbursements of all American political parties and PACs combined.

These realities underscore the wisdom of federal laws that have prohibited corporate independent political expenditures in federal elections since 1947 and direct corporate contributions to candidates since 1907.

They also help explain why American businesses themselves are less than uniformly in favor of overruling Austin and McConnell. As explained in the amicus brief of the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA), which Dēmos co-authored, a decision overruling Austin and McConnell would not be pro-business, but pro-large corporation -- two very different things:

AMIBA's affiliates represent approximately 15,000 independent businesses covering virtually every sector of business, many of which face direct competition from chains and other large corporations. Many large corporations have converted
their economic power into political favors that extract subsidies from taxpayers, stifle enforcement of antitrust laws, create legal tax evasion opportunities, and
other rules that disadvantage small business. . . .

Our market system depends on competition and innovation. Those goals are threatened if the successful businesses of the last generation are allowed (by this Court) and required (by state fiduciary law and market pressures) to use their accumulated wealth to elect politicians who can be counted on to enact laws to protect the incumbent corporations from upstart innovators. . . . If we are to remain a democracy and if our economy is to succeed, it is essential that the law structure the market and not the other way around.

These observations are hardly radical. Just six years ago, in their opinion upholding BCRA's restraints on corporate participation in the political marketplace, two Republican Justices (Justices Stevens and O'Connor, appointed by Presidents Ford and Reagan, respectively) quoted another prominent Republican, Elihu Root, to similar effect:

More than a century ago the "sober-minded Elihu Root" advocated legislation that would prohibit political contributions by corporations in order to prevent " ‘the great aggregations of wealth, from using their corporate funds, directly or indirectly,' " to elect legislators who would " ‘vote for their protection and the advancement of their interests as against those of the public.' " United States v.
Automobile Workers, 352 U. S. 567, 571 (1957) (quoting E. Root, Addresses on Government and Citizenship 143 (R. Bacon & J. Scott eds. 1916)).

Let us hope that sober minds on the Court turn away from the distinctly activist step of overturning Austin and McConnell, and leave the Lochner era in the past where it belongs.

In these interviews with ACSblog, several of the leading figures in Citizens United v. FEC discuss the case, which will be re-argued before the Supreme Court on Septemeber 9, 2009. James Bopp of the Madison Center for Free Speech, Laurence Gold of the AFL-CIO, and Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 took time after ACS's recent press briefing and panel discussion at the National Press Club to share more about what Citizens United means for campaign finance reform and how the Court may rule.

Above: James Bopp, General Counsel, James Madison Center for Free Speech

 

Above: Laurence Gold, Associate General Counsel, AFL-CIO

 

Above: Fred Wertheimer, President & CEO, Democracy 21 and Democracy 21 Education Fund