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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES (TEEN LEANING ON BLACKBOARD)
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A victory for free speech
In a season of marauding government, the Constitution rides to the rescue one more time. This year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision supporting free political speech by overturning some of Congress’s more intrusive limits on election spending. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the 5-4 majority opinion in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which considered whether the government could ban a 90-minute documentary called “Hillary: the Movie” that was set to run on cable channels during the 2008 presidential campaign. Because it was funded by an incorporated group and was critical of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, the film became a target of campaign-finance limits. A 2002 campaign-finance law known as McCain-Feingold banned corporations and unions from “electioneering communications” within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. In their recent ruling, the justices rejected that limit on corporate spending as unconstitutional. Corporations, they ruled, are entitled to the same right that individuals have to spend money on political speech for or against a candidate. Justice Kennedy emphasized that laws designed to control money in politics often bleed into censorship, and that this violates core First Amendment principles. “Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it,” he wrote. The ban on corporate expenditures had a “substantial, nationwide chilling effect” on political speech, he added. The Court’s opinion is especially effective in dismantling McCain-Feingold’s arbitrary exemption for media corporations, under which a corporation that owns a newspaper—News Corp. or the New York Times—retains its First Amendment right to speak freely. “At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure, would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue,” wrote Justice Kennedy. “This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment.” President Obama was especially un-presidential in calling the decision “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies” and other “special interests.” Mr. Obama didn’t mention his labor-union friends as one of those interests, but their political spending will also be protected by the logic Perhaps one day the Court will go even further and overturn Buckley vs. Valeo, the 1976 decision that first tolerated limits on campaign spending. A sensible step now would be for Congress to remove all campaign-finance limits, subject only to immediate disclosure of all spending on the Internet. This is the opinion of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. What’s your opinion? Write to letters.classroom@wsj.com.
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