The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision turns six years old today. As president of Citizens United, I want to move past the Left’s hysteria and set the record straight about the true impact of the decision all these years later — and also sketch out where we go from here.
Citizens United is a conservative advocacy group that has been fighting for constitutional principles and limited government for more than 25 years, and I’m proud that our case reinforced and reasserted robust First Amendment rights and political speech in the United States. I believe more speech is healthier than less speech. Unlike the liberals, I defend their right to free speech as well as my own.
There’s no doubt that the decision has drawn much criticism due to false rhetoric and demagoguery, but these ill-conceived efforts have made clear that it’s the liberal ideology that seeks to suppress free speech they disagree with. Look no further than Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who have both called for a 28th Amendment to the Constitution that would severely limit the First Amendment.
The demagoguery began in earnest at the 2010 State of the Union address when President Obama misleadingly described the Citizens United decision as big corporations being able to take over the political process and drown out the voices of the little guy. Six years later, we can safely say none of this has happened, but Obama and the Left continue their false narrative. Obama created so much paranoia that his Internal Revenue Service began the criminally questionable process of targeting conservative advocacy groups.
The demagoguery began in earnest at the 2010 State of the Union address.
The truth is that Citizens United always was and still is about one thing: a documentary film called Hillary: The Movie. In 2007, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform was criminalizing political speech, and we went to court to fight that unconstitutional law. Citizens United — which is organized as a non-profit corporation — wanted to advertise and distribute the film, but McCain-Feingold made that a criminal act for which I could have been prosecuted and thrown in jail. Most reasonable Americans, regardless of political affiliation, can understand that there was something fundamentally wrong with that situation, and that’s why Citizens United sued the federal government — not for big corporations and more campaign spending, but for our own constitutionally protected free-speech rights. Thankfully the Supreme Court sided with Citizens United and the First Amendment. For this reason, Hillary: The Movie has been described as perhaps the “the most influential political movie ever made.”
The Citizens United decision has paved the way for other filmmakers to produce and release controversial films during a contentious election season. Take, for example, the newly released movie 13 Hours about the Benghazi terrorist attack. If the Supreme Court had ruled against Citizens United in 2010, what would have stopped the Pelosi-Reid Congress and President Obama from capitalizing on that decision by limiting even more political speech? In fact, a recent article in The Federalist stated as much: “Without Citizens United, nothing would stop Congress from further restricting the marketplace of political ideas.”
Nevertheless, as is often the case in the wake of many landmark Supreme Court decisions, legislative reform sometimes becomes a necessity. We didn’t ask for it to happen, but Citizens United did help pave the way for the creation of Super PACs. I believe that our current campaign-finance system is not in good shape and could use some common-sense fixes. That’s why I laid out my policy preferences in a recent op-ed in these pages that would help make Super PACs obsolete. Our campaign-finance system should empower the individual, the candidates, and grassroots membership political-action committees by increasing contribution limits and reducing some regulatory disclosure burdens.
As the sixth anniversary of Citizens United comes and goes, I hope that Congress will hold an honest debate about campaign-finance reform that honors — rather than vilifies — the First Amendment.