Citizens United helped ruin the country. It was passed by Republican Supreme Court Justices

Author: IwantRooseveltagain

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#1
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The vote was 5 to 4

The justices who voted in favor were 

Kennedy - appointed by Reagan
Roberts - George W Bush
Scalia - Reagan
Alito - George W Bush
Thomas - HW Bush

The court's ruling effectively freed corporations and unions to spend money both on "electioneering communications" and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties).
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The court’s ruling basically killed the McCain-Feingold (or BCRA) bipartisan campaign finance law just 8 years after it was established .

BCRA was designed to address 2 things.

Soft money - money raised by political parties to spend on state and local campaigns.

The proliferation of issue advocacy ads - by defining ads that name a federal candidate as “electioneering communications”




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@IwantRooseveltagain
Unfortunately for us, Republicans have put 16 or the last 20 justices on the Supreme Court of the USA. There is not much we can do with the country so divided and right-wingers in control of SCOTUS. It's depressing, so I don't dwell on it.
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Why is this bad? 
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There's a lot of people on the left that want to end the 1st amendment.
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Are you serious? It allowed unlimited dark (untraceable) money in politics - not just for issues, but for helping and attacking individual candidates in federal elections 
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There's a lot of people on the left that want to end the 1st amendment.
Ya, the first amendment (particularly free speech) is all about unlimited dark money funding campaigns. IDIOT

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Luckily, there is only one Justice still on the S. court that voted against the 1st Amendment. (Sotomayor)

Could have been pretty bad if that precedent was set.
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How is it untrackable? 
What makes it untrackable? 

Why should we be concerned about campaign adds by someone other than candidates?
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How did he vote against first admendment, may you elaborate?
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Part of the M-F-Act was that unions could not run ads supporting or condemning any politician. Which meant it was OK for one person to like put up fliers or walk around with a bullhorn, but you couldn't have like 5 people pay someone to do that for them.

That would have made existing media platforms the lords of what propaganda could be pushed and what politician could be supported or attacked.

Woulda been a huge win for establishment DC if those restrictions on free speech were upheld.

Not that they didn't muzzle that speech anyway as the Twitter files showed, regardless of the failure to make it illegal to band together to speak out against establishment DC.

M-F was probably one of the most anti-union bills ever passed.
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How is it untrackable? 
What makes it untrackable? 
Why should we be concerned about campaign adds by someone other than candidates?
Because wealthy individuals and corporations donate money to a “Social Welfare” entities classified by the IRS as a 503C organization and then they send the money to Super PACS and other political groups to create ads and mailers attacking the other side in a campaign.

That’s the problem, the ads ARE controlled by the candidate but they are not supposed to be under election laws. Super PACS aren’t allowed to coordinate with campaigns but staff go back and forth between PACS and campaigns.

There is an excellent documentary done by PBS’s Frontline on this very issue. You can find it on YouTube here

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GP is an idiot substitute teacher who still lives in his mother’s house. Pay no attention to him.
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Why should we be concerned about campaign adds by someone other than candidates?
So because of Citizens United, we have elections where it isn’t the candidates or even the parties that are telling their stories, it’s outside groups with lots of money and an agenda to make government work for them at the expense of ordinary Americans. Get it?

These outside groups, such as Super PACS and lobbyists are based in Washington and after they get their guy elected they hand the politicians legislation they want passed that will help them get rich at the expense of everyone else.

Super PACs do opposition research and track candidates with a guy and video camera to use in attack ads. These attack ads could be on TV, radio, social media, or Direct Mail. Super PACs will also share their OPO research with other outside groups who make ads.

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@hey-yo

Free speech means that people other than the candidates get a narrative too.
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A 501C(4)  not 503 as I wrote earlier - can take unlimited money and not have to disclose the names of donors, by claiming to be advocating for certain issues and not for or against any particular candidate.

Avoid certain “magic words” such as “vote for” and you have an issue advocacy ad and not an election ad. Even if the ad is run during an election.
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So a Super PAC can raise unlimited money, use it to do opposition research then hand that information to another outside group that is a 501(C)4 group who can also raise unlimited money from donors they don’t have to disclose, and create attack ads that can be seen in any state in the country.
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In 1996 Bradley Smith published "Faulty Assumptions and Undemocratic Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform" in the Yale Law Journal. In "Faulty Assumptions", Smith set forth a case against campaign finance regulation, arguing that efforts to regulate money in politics had been based on a series of incorrect beliefs about the effects of money in politics, and that as a result reform efforts had failed to accomplish their objectives and had made many of the problems of money in politics worse.[2]

It’s funny how this guy defending Citizens United characterizes their political speech as hackneyed. Even Republicans know that their ideas and thinking is stupid.

“The case addressed the question of whether federal campaign-finance law limits the right of the activist group Citizens United to distribute a hackneyed political documentary entitled Hillary: The Movie.“
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The law, he ­contended, would even require banning a book that made the same points as the Citizens United video.
This makes no sense because a book in a library does not involve campaign spending. McCain Feingold and Citizens United are about campaign finance reform.



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Free speech means that people other than the candidates get a narrative too.
To me, free speech is about being able to criticize a politician, even the President, without worrying I’ll be arrested or audited by the IRS. It’s not about being able to spend as much money as I want to influence an election in some state I don’t even live in.

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“ If the problem is that venal legislators are betraying the public trust in exchange for campaign contributions, why would we expect them not to be equally motivated by base impulses when passing campaign-finance legislation? “

Like McCain-Feingold? No, they passed that law for the altruistic goal of stopping special interest money from distorting elections. From lying early and often to a public that is woefully and poorly informed. 95% of voters are low information voters. They are easily manipulated and lack critical thinking skills. 
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The Supreme Court pulled back some of these limits in the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, holding that FECA's limits on expenditures made independently of a candidate violated the First Amendment. The decision further confined regulation so that it covered only expenditures that "expressly advocated" the election or defeat of a candidate, using specific words such as "vote for" or "vote against." This allowed for heavy spending on "issue ads" that might criticize or praise a candidate but stop short of expressly urging a vote one way or the other.
This is when the monster was let out of the cage. Thanks 1976! This is when the gray fog started to form that clouded what was issue advocacy versus what was endorsing a particular candidate