Is the Supreme Court’s decision Citizens United this past week all that big a deal? There’s an argument — a good argument, I thought at first — that it isn’t. If we’ve learned anything over the last year, this argument runs, we’ve learned that business leaders are political cowards, unwilling to stand up even for as basic a right as private property.

When the Obama administration took over GM, you’ll recall, it simply waved aside the rights of certain bondholders. Did business leaders erupt, denoucing the administration? The reverse. They remained silent, consoling each other in private that they had a duty to their shareholders to do so. Roll over, engage in submissiveness displays — anything rather than risk the animosity of an administration and a Congress capable of subjecting corporations to punitive regulatory action or takings by executive fiat. Last week the Supreme Court may have disencumbered the First Amendment, but why would anyone suppose that in doing so the Court had also somehow endowed business leaders with spines?

Whom would it take to see through this argument? A constitutional lawyer? An unusually insightful businessman? A polemicist? As it happens, Hugh Hewitt is all three. Hugh has now presented the counterargument. An excerpt:

The choice facing every Board of Directors and CEO in the aftermath of Citizens United: Ought the corporation they run be involved in this year’s campaigns . . . ?
Boards and CEOs might want to begin their consideration of how to use their restored freedom to speak on campaigns and to support or oppose candidates by convening at least a meeting or two on the general subject of how the makeup of Congress is impacting their business. . . .This isn’t a question for McKinsey or Bain, but one for public intellectuals, pollsters and policy/politics gurus of the sort found at the White House Writers Group and or the Shawmut Group (which just ran Scott Brown’s campaign.). Ask them. . . .
You can, if you want to – -and I hope you do want to — spend $10 million in an independent expenditure campaign to defeat Barbara Boxer. (If you are a coal company, why wouldn’t you? And with an open declaration of why and how you intend to go about it.)

If you are a coal company, why wouldn’t you?

If corporations used to owe it to their shareholders to lie low, staying out of politics, in other words, they now owe it to their shareholders to speak up, defending themselves. Board members and executives will still feel squeamish about political activity, but at annual meetings from now on shareholders will rise to challenge them.

I mean, you can just see it, can’t you? “The proposed cap-and-trade legislation is going to raise our cost of doing business,” some cranky, dyspeptic shareholder will now almost certainly argue before the executives of, let us say, the Massey Energy Company. “Mr. CEO, members of the board, the Supreme Court has already told you that you have a constitutional right to fight back. What I’m telling you now is that you have a fiduciary duty to do so.”

And you know what? That cranky, dyspeptic shareholder will prove very, very difficult to refute.