The 2009-2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC has caused a good deal of controversy since its resolution and is a ruling that Hillary Clinton promises to overturn should she become president - if necessary, by way of a new amendment to the US Constitution. However, many have a limited understanding of exactly how the case came to be, what was at stake in the case, and the implications behind the court's decision.

First, I'll need to address a common statement made by those critical of the ruling: "Corporations aren't people." For starters, a corporation is defined as "a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law" (Wikipedia - see law.com for a much longer definition). This means that, right or wrong, all rights that are guaranteed to citizens of the United States are also guaranteed to US corporations. This fact is what defines them as corporations and distinguishes them from any other type of organization, so yes - in a legal sense, corporations are people. What those who make the statement referenced above are really arguing is that corporations shouldn't be people - or, given that their legal equivalence to people is their defining characteristic, that they shouldn't exist. In any case, this is another question entirely and was not what was decided by Citizens United.

Now, on to the case itself. In 2008, during Hillary Clinton's battle with Barack Obama for the DNC nomination, a non-profit organization called Citizens United released a documentary entitled Hillary: The Movie. In the lead-up to the production and release of the movie, Citizens United appealed to a district court in Washington, D.C. that portions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act were unconstitutional. (The BCRA stated that corporations could not launch "electioneering communications" in the thirty days leading up to a primary election or the sixty days leading up to a general election, and also that such communications could not be funded from the corporations' general treasuries.) The district court denied the appeal, and Citizens United brought the case before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a 4-5 ruling along ideological lines, ruled that collective political speech (such as the filming and distribution of Hillary: The Movie) was protected under the First Amendment.

As corporations and individuals must be treated in the same way under the law, to deny corporations the right to spend money on political or electioneering communications would necessitate denial of that same right to individuals, and denying individuals the right to political expression is perhaps one of the most noticeable and necessary parts of any tyranny. Without this right, those in opposition to Citizens United wouldn't be able to voice their discontent in the first place! With this in mind, and given corporations' legal equivalence to individuals, the fact that they must be guaranteed the right to political expression is obvious.

Whether or not it is appropriate to treat some group of people with a shared pool of resources as legally a person is another matter. I'll try not to go too far in-depth with this, but I'll offer an illustration. Say I was an entrepreneur who took risks, worked hard, and gathered together enough money to put up my own billboard. Printed on the billboard was, simply, "Romans 6:23". Few would dispute my constitutional right to express myself in such a way.

Now, picture an alternate situation in which a friend and I decided to work together and raise the funds necessary to put up the same billboard. We would still have the right to do so under the first amendment... right? What if we instead put something on the billboard slamming Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? How large, in terms of either individuals involved or resources employed, would some organization have to be for that right to be lost? Could such consequences be avoided by an informal group?

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some convincing arguments for why we should restrict corporations' ability to campaign on behalf of candidates. Doing so can obviously create avenues for corruption, with corporate interests supporting candidates in return for political favors. I'd argue that the fault for this lies with the politicians themselves and that the different parts of government should monitor each other carefully to ensure that this sort of behavior does not go unpunished. In fact, I'd argue that the government has no business interfering with private enterprise in the first place so long as markets are kept competitive, and should therefore not have the capacity it currently does to participate in such crony capitalism. Still, given the corruption we've seen in government in the past, it's not hard at all to see why so many oppose the ruling. In any case, it is my view that Hillary's position on the case is not constitutional - and may very well be influenced by the fact that the film that inspired it may have cost her the candidacy.