MercatorNet: What the Supreme Court did (and didn’t do) to religious freedom last week

MercatorNet: What the Supreme Court did (and didn’t do) to religious freedom last week

In Hobby Lobby, the Court ruled that a federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), applied to the case, and that it covered “any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.” The only question that government could consider was not the truth or reasonableness or centrality of the religious belief, but only whether the belief were sincere, which was not doubted in the case of these companies. Interestingly, RFRA had passed in 1993 by overwhelming majorities of both houses of Congress. This is because religious freedom, like free speech, is a vital part of our legal heritage and until recently, viewed as axiomatic.
The Court said that companies were legal persons within the meaning of RFRA, an unexceptional view dating back to the Middle Ages, when the Church, as the Body or Corpus of Christ, was viewed as a corporation with legal personality. Citing William Blackstone, the authoritative expounder of the common law at the time of the American founding, the Court recognized that there were two types of corporations, ecclesiastical and lay, and that lay corporations could also have eleemosynary and religious purposes. (The amicus brief I filed in support of Hobby Lobby for four non-profit corporations made the same point, also citing Blackstone.)
Because of the political firestorm that erupted several years ago when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of corporate free-speech rights in the Citizens United case, which President Obama had denounced in his State of the Union address, this question of the First Amendment rights of corporations, and specifically whether for-profit corporations were legal persons, has become politicized. Even so, two of the liberal justices, Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan, did not join that part of Ginsburg’s dissent that said that for-profit corporations were not legal persons.
As Justice Alito pointed out for the majority, “it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction [that corporations are legal ‘persons’] is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form of organizations used by human beings to achieve desired ends … When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people.”
Since corporations, or at least closely-held family-run companies, can claim to exercise religion, the law requires that if their religious exercise is substantially burdened, then the government must show both that it is seeking to achieve compelling government interests, and that it is doing so in the least religiously restrictive way possible: a demanding ends and means test. If the government passes the test, the matter belongs to Caesar. If not, then it belongs to God and the religious conscience of believers.
Justice Kennedy concurred by saying that while free contraceptives for women was a compelling government interest, the government had a lesser restrictive alternative in that it could either provide the contraceptive coverage itself or extend the accommodation HHS was already giving religions non-profits, to for-profit closely-held companies with religious objections. Because he was the swing vote, the majority had to assume for the sake of argument that there was a compelling interest in free contraceptives, though the prevalence of exceptions in the regulation for grandfathered companies, companies with less than 50 employees, and Churches and other religious organizations, makes that very questionable. If it’s so important to government, then why is it handing out exemptions like party favors to all those except for-profit companies with religious objections?
And so the majority ruled that the huge fines the families faced for not covering the abortifacient contraceptives did constitute a substantial burden on their religious practice, and that even assuming a compelling government interest in support of the regulation, the government had failed to show that cost-free access to these contraceptives was the least-restrictive means of achieving its desired goal. Either the government could assume the cost itself, or extend the accommodation it already was giving non-profit employers with religious objections to the mandate.
The Court went on to say that its ruling did not necessarily apply to vaccinations or blood transfusions, not did it provide a shield to employers illegally discriminating on religious grounds. Those matters will have to wait for another day.

I was struck by how over-the-top much reaction to the Hobby Lobby case was, as if, all of a sudden, applying a law intended to protect religious freedom to the facts of a particular case were a threat to civil liberties.
Justice Ginsburg, for example, calls it a “decision of startling breadth,” and demonstrates that she is opposed to RFRA, in spite of the careful hedging of the majority’s opinion. In front of the Supreme Court building the Monday that the decision was issued, there were contending demonstrators. The pro-government contingent had a slogan, “My birth control is none of your business.” Precisely. That’s what the companies were saying: Get your hand out of my pocket.
As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s full-page ad in the New York Times asserted, quoting retired Justice John Paul Stevens, “Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” Taranto retorted: “Then shut up.” But of course corporations, like the people who comprise them, can be hypocritical too.

No, the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision is not based upon a scientific mistake - The Washington Post

No, the Supreme Court’s <em>Hobby Lobby</em> decision is not based upon a scientific mistake - The Washington Post

There are reasonable arguments to be made against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, but the charge that the decision is based on science fiction is not among them.  The scientific soundness of a religious objector’s beliefs is not at issue in religious liberty cases and, even if it were, there was a reasonable (if not uncontroversial) basis for the specific factual claims upon which Hobby Lobby’s claim was based.

In Hobby Lobby, the Greens and the Hahns (the owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, respectively) claimed that providing insurance coverage for four forms of contraception would violate their religious beliefs.  They claimed that this is because they believe the four forms of contraception at issue (“Plan B,” Ella, and two types of IUD) are capable of terminating a pregnancy.  In making this claim, the Greens and the Hahns embraced the view that a pregnancy begins at conception, rather than at implantation (which is how pregnancy is defined by most medical authorities and under federal law).  This is not relevant, however.  They could have also claimed that pregnancy begins when a woman is visited by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that the challenged forms of contraception chase the Spaghetti Monster away.  Under RFRA, a religious adherent’s beliefs are taken as a given precisely because many religious claims will strike non-believers as strange or incredible.  There’s no scientific evidence for transubstantiation, but that would hardly matter to a RFRA claim that imposed a substantial burden on those who wish to partake in communion.

As Bagley notes further, the federal government accepted the plaintiffs’ characterization of the scientific evidence, if not their conclusion that preventing implantation of an egg is the equivalent of an abortion.  The Food & Drug Administration’s website notes that all four forms of disputed contraception may prevent implantation, as do the FDA-approved labels (as noted in footnote 4 of the government’s brief).  An amicus brief submitted at the certiorari stage on behalf of medical organizations disputes whether it is proper to label these contraceptive methods as “abortifacients,” insofar as they all act before the start of a pregnancy (implantation). Yet, as Ed Whelan notes, the brief also concedes the possibility that these contraceptive methods may prevent implantation.
Assuming, as the weight of current scientific evidence suggests, that it is exceedingly rare for any of these methods to prevent implantation or otherwise cause the termination of a fertilized egg, it is not unscientific to adopt a more precautionary position due to religious or moral concerns, and it is hardly “anti-science” for the courts to accept such a religious belief when evaluating a RFRA claim.  The plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby advanced a claim based on religious belief, and that is how all nine justices on the Court treated it.
Science retains substantial authority in our political discourse.  This makes it appealing to tar one’s political opponents with an “anti-science” brush. Yet in their zeal to affix the “anti-science” label to the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby critics have gotten ahead of themselves.  Whatever the merits of other critiques of the Hobby Lobby opinion, this one falls apart.

Dear Emptyheaded Left Wing Writers

Dear Emptyheaded Left Wing Writers

Please stop saying that a corporation is a "fictitious person" as part of your case in chief against the Hobby Lobby decision.
For one thing, you sound stupid. Not because this is untrue, but rather because it is obviously true, and 90% of all literate people not only know "corporations are fictitious people" but in fact have known this since long before you apparently did.

Secondly, and here I fear I will lose you completely because this is going to get slightly abstract and logical, the fact that "corporations are fictitious persons" actually destroys your arguments, rather than strengthens them, which, if you'd bother to have read the Hobby Lobby case, which you have not and will not, ever, you'd already know.
See, a corporation is a fictitious person. It is a made-up designation, created by state law, to permit business concerns to live longer than the lifespan of a natural person.
It is a fictitious person. It is not a real person. Fictitious -- an imaginary construct of the law.
Think about what that means.
This means that in a closely-held corporation -- where five or fewer people control the majority of shares (and in fact usually control all of it) -- the "corporation" does not exist in any real way, except for its listing in the tax records of a state.
In a small closely-held corporation, "the corporation" only means "these five guys right here."
The Supreme Court did not acknowledge that corporations quacorporations (look up "qua" on your own time, idiots) have "religious freedoms." Rather, it recognized the obvious -- that in the case of a closely-held corporation, the corporation being a fictitious entity and all, an imposition of a duty on "the corporation" is in reality just an imposition of a duty on the five or fewer people (often one or two) who own it.Thus, when we say the Hobby Lobby corporation must provide abortifacient drugs to its employees, this is precisely the same as laying this responsibility on the five or fewer individual persons (who definitely have the right to religious freedom) to provide abortifacient drugs to their employees.Given that the corporation is a fictitious entity of no tangible presence (something you seem so delighted to have recently learned), forcing the corporation to provide abortions is precisely the same as forcing the family who owns Hobby Lobby to provide them.
You see? You see what your problem is here?
I mean, one of your problems. You have many, beginning with the facts that 1 you are not terribly well educated and 2 you seem to believe you are extremely well educated.
Now, in a very large corporation, what we call a "publicly traded" corporation, wherein many thousands (or even millions) of persons might have shares and thus ownership interests in this fictitious person, one could very easily make the case that each individual shareholder is so attenuated from actual control of the corporation that to impose a duty on the corporation does not implicate the individual shareholder at all, or implicates him so slightly, so trivially, that we can round down and simply say "Forcing Exxon to provide abortion drugs should not offend the conscience of Exxon's thousands of owners."
We could say in that case that an imposition on the corporation has no real implication for the individual owner. He would own, what, one thousand shares out of over ten million shares of the decision to provide abortion services?
A very diffuse responsibility indeed.
But you cannot make this claim when a family of four owns almost all of the stock in a corporation. In that case, the burdens placed on this fictitious entity are actually burdens on the people -- Unless you idiots want to make the case that this fictitious entity that has so mesmerized you actually has the tangible quality of being areal person whose actions do not implicate its real-person owners.But then in that case you shouldn't keep saying it's a fictitious person-- you should be arguing it's close enough to a real person to be treated as such.You should be arguing that a corporation is so close to real that we should say a burden on it means nothing at all to its owners-- who are just third-parties with barely anything at all to do with the real person being burdened. The real person being burdened (in this argument) is the corporation, which is basically a totes real person, and no other people are burdened at all.

And it seems to me if the courts had ruled that a corporation is a legal human being, it would be illegal to own one.

George Will on the People’s Rights Amendment

George Will on the People’s Rights Amendment

via The Volokh Conspiracy by Ilya Somin on 5/5/12

(Ilya Somin)

George Will recently published a good Washington Post column on the ill-conceived People's Rights Amendment, which Eugene Volokh and I blogged about here and here. Will points out several serious flaws in the proposal, and builds on some of the points we made:

Controversies can be wonderfully clarified when people follow the logic of illogical premises to perverse conclusions….

Joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), 26 other Democrats and one Republican, [Rep. James McGovern] proposes a constitutional amendment to radically contract First Amendment protections. His purpose is to vastly expand government's power — i.e., the power of incumbent legislators — to write laws regulating, rationing or even proscribing speech in elections that determine the composition of the legislature and the rest of the government. McGovern's proposal vindicates those who say that most campaign-finance "reforms" are incompatible with the First Amendment…

His "People's Rights Amendment" declares that the Constitution protects only the rights of "natural persons," not such persons organized in corporations…

McGovern stresses that his amendment decrees that "all corporate entities — for-profit and nonprofit alike" — have no constitutional rights. So Congress — and state legislatures and local governments — could regulate to the point of proscription political speech, or any other speech, by the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, NARAL Pro-Choice America or any of the other tens of thousands of nonprofit corporate advocacy groups, including political parties and campaign committees.

Newspapers, magazines, broadcasting entities, online journalism operations — and most religious institutions — are corporate entities. McGovern's amendment would strip them of all constitutional rights. By doing so, the amendment would empower the government to do much more than proscribe speech. Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School, writing for the Volokh Conspiracy blog, notes that government, unleashed by McGovern's amendment, could regulate religious practices at most houses of worship, conduct whatever searches it wants, reasonable or not, of corporate entities, and seize corporate-owned property for whatever it deems public uses — without paying compensation. Yes, McGovern's scythe would mow down the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, as well as the First.

One can argue for the constitutionality of campaign finance regulations on several grounds. But doing so on the basis that people organized into corporate entities have no constitutional rights does indeed lead us down the dangerous path dramatically illustrated by the Peoples' Rights Amendment.

Jeffrey Toobin on Citizens United

Jeffrey Toobin on Citizens United

via The Volokh Conspiracy by Jonathan H. Adler on 5/14/12

(Jonathan H. Adler)
The latest New Yorker has an extensive excerpt of Jeffrey Toobin's forthcoming book, The Oath: The Obama White House vs. the Supreme Court, focusing on the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The story, "Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision," is everything you'd expect from a Toobin piece. It's engaging and informative, with exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting of how the decision came to be. This stuff is catnip for court watchers. Yet the article also contains plenty of subtle (and not-so-subtle) spin in service of Toobin's broader narrative of an out-of-control conservative court. As a consequence, Toobin paints a somewhat misleading picture of the case and the Court.

The heart of Toobin's article tells the story of how Citizens United metastasized from a narrow case about the application of federal campaign finance law to an obscure conservative documentary to a significant decision vindicating the First Amendment rights of corporations. As Toobin tells the tale, after the case was first argued Chief Justice Roberts drafted a narrow opinion that would have held for Citizens United on statutory grounds, but leaving the statutory regime intact. The vote would still have been 5-4, but it would have been a far less significant case. Justice Kennedy was not happy with this result, however, and authored a concurrence calling for a broader holding that would rest on First Amendment grounds. Kennedy's concurrence apparently swayed enough of the court's conservatives that Roberts initially acquiesced. Such a broad ruling would be improper, the court's liberals complained, as the broader First Amendment questions had not been briefed and were not properly before the Court. Yet as there was no interest in a narrower holding, the Court ordered a reargument with supplemental briefing that would place the First Amendment question front and center.

Toobin dwells on Justice Stevens' complaint that the Court's broad holding in Citizens United was unnecesary, as the Court could have held for the petitioners on narrower, statutory grounds. Yet as Toobin's own reporting confirms, no one other than Chief Justice Roberts had any interest in resolving the case on such grounds. Even when the case was first argued, not a single liberal justice was prepared to side with Citizens United, in no small part because the statutory argument was so weak.
Toobin criticizes the Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart for a concession at the first oral argument that may have sealed the government's fate.

Since McCain-Feingold forbade the broadcast of "electronic communications" shortly before elections, this was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? "Do you think the Constitution required Congress to draw the line where it did, limiting this to broadcast and cable and so forth?" Alito said. Could the law limit a corporation from "providing the same thing in a book? Would the Constitution permit the restriction of all those as well?"

Yes, Stewart said: "Those could have been applied to additional media as well."

The Justices leaned forward. It was one thing for the government to regulate television commercials. That had been done for years. But a book? Could the government regulate the content of a book?

"That's pretty incredible," Alito responded. "You think that if a book was published, a campaign biography that was the functional equivalent of express advocacy, that could be banned?"

"I'm not saying it could be banned," Stewart replied, trying to recover. "I'm saying that Congress could prohibit the use of corporate treasury funds and could require a corporation to publish it using its—" But clearly Stewart was saying that Citizens United, or any company or nonprofit like it, could not publish a partisan book during a Presidential campaign. . . .

Stewart was wrong. Congress could not ban a book. McCain-Feingold was based on the pervasive influence of television advertising on electoral politics, the idea that commercials are somehow unavoidable in contemporary American life. The influence of books operates in a completely different way. Individuals have to make an affirmative choice to acquire and read a book. Congress would have no reason, and no justification, to ban a book under the First Amendment.

Yet here it is Toobin who is wrong, not Stewart. The statutory provision at issue was limited to broadcast, cable and satellite communications, and the film at issue was to be shown as a cable on-demand program, but the government never sought to defend the law on the basis that it was limited to electronic media. After all, the point of the was to limit the role of money in campaigns, not limit television advertising. The position the government was defending was that Congress could limit corporate expenditures related to campaigns, not that it could regulate TV. Under this theory, a corporate-funded book with impermissible campaign-related content would receive no more First Amendment protection than a corporate-funded video or film, just as Stewart said. If this is an incredible proposition, that says more about the position the government sought to advance than it does Stewart's oral argument. Campaign finance activist Fred Wertheimer made the same concession when pressed by the NYT. It's true that Solicitor General Elena Kagan would back away from this position when it was her turn to argue the case at the second oral argument, but not without first acknowledging that the statute's language could apply to "full-length books" and that there would, in the government's view, be no problem with banning corporate-funded pamphlets.
Like many of the decision's critics, Toobin suggests Citizens United is best seen as the product of the "aggressive conservative judicial activism" of Chief Justice Roberts and the court's conservative majority.

Citizens United is a distinctive product of the Roberts Court. The decision followed a lengthy and bitter behind-the-scenes struggle among the Justices that produced both secret unpublished opinions and a rare reargument of a case. The case, too, reflects the aggressive conservative judicial activism of the Roberts Court. It was once liberals who were associated with using the courts to overturn the work of the democratically elected branches of government, but the current Court has matched contempt for Congress with a disdain for many of the Court's own precedents. When the Court announced its final ruling on Citizens United, on January 21, 2010, the vote was five to four and the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy. Above all, though, the result represented a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts. Even without writing the opinion, Roberts, more than anyone, shaped what the Court did. As American politics assumes its new form in the post-Citizens United era, the credit or the blame goes mostly to him.

As Toobin tells the tale, Citizens United is emblematic of the current Court's assault on precedent and the prerogatives of the political branches. It's a nice story, but it's not true. "Judicial activism" is a notoriously malleable charge, but if "judicial activism" is shorthand for striking down federal statutes and overturning judicial precedents, the Roberts Court is the least "activist" court of the post-war period. As a New York Times analysis showed, the Roberts Court strikes down statutes and overturns Court precedents at a slower rate than any of is post-war predecessors, and it's not even close. "Activism" is also a peculiar charge to make about this case, as the dissenting justices were just as reluctant to embrace a narrow statutory holding and were just as willing to overturn precedent as those in the majority. They just sought to move the law in the opposite direction. If Citizens United is supposed to be evidence of unprecedented "activism," it's not clear what "activism" means.

The most interesting parts of Toobin's article are those that disclose how Citizens United was handled inside the Court. This is great stuff, and testament to Toobin's skill as a reporter, but I still have some misgivings. We don't know the identities of Toobin's sources, and some of his claims are difficult to check. His story may reflect how some justices or clerks saw the case, but there may well be another side, and we won't know until such time as the relevant court documents are released. I also cannot help but wonder whether some of Toobin's sources, such as former Supreme Court clerks, may have violated their own ethical obligations in disclosing portions of the Court's internal deliberations. Even if Toobin's sources were sitting or former justices, there is something unseemly about the selective disclosure of what went on inside the Court on such a recent case.

In any event, the article is still worth reading — as I am sure Toobin's book will be as well. Some portions will just go down better with a healthy dose of salt.

UPDATE: Tom Goldstein has a similar reaction to Toobin's narrative about Chief Justice Roberts:

The theme of the piece is that Chief Justice Roberts orchestrated the case's metamorphosis from a narrow ruling about statutory construction to a much broader constitutional decision with sweeping implications for campaign finance.

I should disclose that I am naturally inclined towards that reading of the history. I think that the Chief Justice is quite conservative and a brilliant tactician, including in undoing significant pieces of the legacy of the Court's O'Connor era. I also disagree with the Citizens United decision.

But despite that, while the article is a fascinating and full accounting of the case and the background of the Court's rapid movement to the right, the facts reported by Toobin don't seem to support his conclusions about the Chief Justice.

The Movement: The Left's War on the First Amendment

The Movement: The Left's War on the First Amendment

via Breitbart Feed on 4/28/12

During this Congress, there have been at least 11 resolutions filed by Democrat lawmakers calling to amend the Constitution because of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission. All of these amendments will chill free speech and would make the Founders cringe. As President of Citizens United, I find it quite disappointing how none of these lawmakers have a clue what the United States Supreme Court actually decided in Citizens United.
Last week, you had Nancy Pelosi saying that with Citizens United, "the Supreme Court had unleashed a predator that was oozing slime into the political system, and that, indeed, is not an exaggeration." Oozing slime – really, Nancy? Having more speech, not less, in the political process is paramount to our democracy. Without robust free speech in political discourse, incumbents have an inherent advantage. That is why President Obama and Democrats in Congress tried so hard to pass an incumbent protection bill, aka the DISCLOSE Act, back in 2010. They failed, and Nancy Pelosi was fired as Speaker of the House.
Then you have former White House Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel spouting off about the Citizens United case on MSNBC this week. Emanuel called the decision "one of the single worst decisions by a court" and said, "It will be a blemish on all of their records for allowing this decision." I'm not surprised to see Rahm Emanuel lash out against Citizens United. Quite frankly, I was a bit disappointed that in the days following our decision the ever-so-subtle Rahm did not send a dead fish or horse head to our offices.
While Rahm has singled out Citizens United, his liberal colleague Senator Charles Schumer took this assault on our decision and the Supreme Court a step further, declaring , "It is the worst decision since Plessy v. Ferguson – I believe that – of the United States Supreme Court."
The Court has made mistakes in the past. Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sanford certainly stand out. But can one really argue with a straight face that Citizens United, which restored the First Amendment protection of political speech, is the modern equivalent of Plessy or Dred Scott? Bombastic statements like this are proof that liberals do not understand the fundamentals of the Citizens United case and are not interested in knowing the truth about the case.
In 2007, Citizens United sought to promote and broadcast via video-on-demand a film critical of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Under the speech-stifling provisions of McCain-Feingold, if Citizens United had broadcast "Hillary The Movie"  or run advertisements promoting the film, its officers could have been subject to prosecution and potential imprisonment for up to five years. This means I could have gone to jail for doing the very same thing Michael Moore had done back in 2004 with "Fahrenheit 9/11."   The Supreme Court struck down this piece of the McCain-Feingold law and stated in the opinion for the majority that it's "stranger than fiction for our Government to make... political speech a crime."
That is why it is so disturbing to see 11 constitutional amendments and counting trying to take away free speech. These amendments have been proposed to curtail the right to political speech that was restored by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC. These proposed amendments take one of two forms --amendments that would deny First Amendment protections to all except "natural persons" and amendments that explicitly grant Congress and the States the power to regulate, limit, or prohibit political contributions and expenditures.
Both forms of amendments, whether seeking to rewrite the First Amendment or seeking to expand the power of incumbents to regulate their challengers, are aimed at chilling political speech and reducing the number of speakers in the political arena. It is always a slippery slope when the government can decide what is free speech. When Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, and others of the crazed left make it their high mission to defeat Citizens United, I know I've struck a chord.
It's no surprise to see liberal incumbents fighting to silence voices of dissent. It's also no surprise that a chorus of liberal special interest groups have joined their fight. Robert Weissman of Public Citizen, Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21, and even former Republican nominee to the FEC Trevor Potter have utilized their non-profit corporations to fight to overturn Citizens United. I personally don't agree with their crusades to silence the freedom of speech, but as a staunch defender of the First Amendment, I'll fight to my dying day for them to be able to use corporate assets to voice their opinions.
I am sure in the coming weeks and months you will hear a lot of falsehoods about the Citizens United decision. The left's war will only intensify if President Obama loses in the fall, because they will need a scapegoat for their failed liberal agenda. I will wear it as a badge of honor if the Citizens United case is used as a foil by the left. In the end, we won because Citizens United was on the right side of the First Amendment.

Citizens United: Two Years of Free Speech

Citizens United: Two Years of Free Speech

via Big Government by David Bossie on 1/20/12

Two years ago the United States Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Citizens United v. FEC.  The Court reversed an anomaly in campaign finance law by restoring the First Amendment protection of political speech.

Over the past two years Citizens United's victory has been the subject of countless attacks. It has inspired some members of Congress to attempt to pass legislation to chill political speech, caused the President to chastise the Supreme Court during the State of the Union, and even led to irrational demands that we amend the Constitution to curtail the Freedom of Speech.
Despite the heated rhetoric, little in politics has changed.  Before Citizens United, candidates, independent groups and political parties ran political ads.  Shockingly, the same is true after Citizens United.  Some lament the amount of money spent on political speech, but as George Will has noted, Americans will spend more money on Easter candy than they spend electing a President.
The liberal drumbeat against the decision seems to be led by a group of leftist non-profit organizations.  These groups, with such good governance names as Democracy Unlimited, Democracy 21, Public Citizen, and Common Cause, are fighting to overturn the First Amendment.

One such non-profit organization, Democracy Unlimited, has launched the Move to Amend campaign.  Their campaign hopes to pass a constitutional amendment to curtail the First Amendment.  This group plans to celebrate the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision by staging "Occupy the Courts" protests across the country.  While the corporate-owned press will praise these protests, I have little doubt that if a conservative non-profit employed a similar tactic it would be dismissed as "Astroturf" lobbying, rather than heralded as a populist uprising.  Of course the anti-corporate speech protest is paid for and sponsored by Democracy Unlimited.
When I sued the FEC I was fighting to protect the freedom of speech.  I'm glad to see these liberals and their corporate sponsors exercising that right.

Chapman on the FEC ruling

http://townhall.com/columnists/SteveChapman/2010/01/24/free_speech_for_corporations?page=full&comments=true

It is often argued that corporate speech may be banned because corporations enjoy certain privileges afforded by law. But it's a longstanding constitutional axiom that the government may not require the surrender of constitutional rights in exchange for state-furnished benefits -- say, barring criticism of Congress by residents of public housing.

Once you grant the government that sort of power, it is bound to expand. Newspapers could be forbidden to make endorsements. Right now, media companies are exempt from the ban. But why should a newspaper be free to spend money urging voters to support a candidate, while other companies are not?