Our colleagues ridicule the idea of regulating expenditures based on “nothing more” than a fear that corporations have a special “ability to persuade,”

Amendment, or in the decisions of this Court, for the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation that cannot prove, to the satisfaction of a court, a material effect on its business or property. It cannot realistically be said to be the shareholders, who tend to be far removed from the day-to-day decisions of the firm and whose political preferences may be opaque to management. In December 2007, a cable company offered, for a payment of $1.2 million, to make The legislative and judicial proceedings relating to BCRA generated a substantial body of evidence suggesting that, as corporations grew more and more adept at crafting “issue ads” to help or harm a particular candidate, these nominally independent expenditures began to corrupt the political process in a very direct sense. That perception today is the same as it was a century ago when Theodore Roosevelt delivered the speeches to Congress that, in time, led to the limited prohibition on corporate campaign expenditures that is overruled today. While some means of communication may be less effective than others at influencing the public in different contexts, any effort by the Judiciary to decide which means of communications are to be preferred for the particular type of message and speaker would raise questions as to the courts’ own lawful authority. Those few corporations that existed at the founding were authorized by grant of a special legislative charter. [    To the extent that the Government’s case for reaffirming President Roosevelt, in his 1905 annual message to Congress, declared:“ ‘All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be, as far as it went, an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts.’ ” United States v. None of this is to suggest that corporations can or should be denied an opportunity to participate in election campaigns or in any other public forum (much less that a work of art such as Corporate expenditures are distinguishable from individual expenditures in this respect.



“The Findings also demonstrate that Members of Congress seek to have corporations and unions run these advertisements on their behalf. Its theory, if accepted, would empower the Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations—as the major ones are. As to the first, if Congress had been seeking to protect dissenting shareholders, it would not have banned corporate speech in only certain media within 30 or 60 days before an election. First, the Court could have ruled, on statutory grounds, that a feature-length film distributed through video-on-demand does not qualify as an “electioneering communication” under §203 of BCRA, The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.

   Doing so would undermine the rule-of-law values that justify Although he also joined the majority opinion, Scalia wrote separately to confront the arguments in the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens.

2d, at 276, nn. The Court’s blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve. See 530 F. Supp. The majority proposes several other justifications for the sweep of its ruling.

Second, the Court’s strongest historical evidence all relates to the Framers’ views on the press, see  Cf.

§§100.29(b)(7)(i)(G), (ii).