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So this morning I am inspired by a clip from the otherwise-decent (from a libertarian perspective) movie Captain Fantastic. In the scene, a small child laments the pernicious implications of the Citizens United ruling, saying it means "our country is ruled by corporations and their lobbyists." I'm wondering whether, as a matter of rhetoric, it would be effective to embarrass people with the specific facts of the Citizens United v. FEC case. "Defend this, if you dare!" While for many, that descision represents all that is evil as they champion the high-minded principle of "preventing corporations from buying elections," I suspect few would defend the particulars of how the law would have applied in that instance.
The usual story is this: the Supreme Court decision's decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates for corporate money to dominate American elections, as the Supreme Court outrageously declared that "corporations are people." But this portrayal overlooks the specific and basically indefensible details of the case itself. Citizens United, a nonprofit organization, sought to air a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton leading up to the 2008 primary elections. The Federal Election Commission blocked the documentary, citing campaign finance regulations that restricted "electioneering communications" by corporations and labor unions within a certain time frame before elections.
Imagine an analogous case today: a group of citizens is determined to prove that the prosecutions against Donald Trump are not politically-motivated "lawfare", but rather solid and legitimate cases, and produces a documentary to make that argument, only to be blocked by from disseminating the film. Is this not an outrageous position for the government to take?
Opening up this line of attack could easily backfire: if I make people defend the facts of specific Supreme Court cases, I am sure they can find their own Supreme Court decisions which I like, but which side with unsympathetic parties. I don't really want to stand up next to the guy holding a "God hates fags" sign. But the iconic and notorious status of the Citizens United case in popular discourse deserves some effort at pushback.
tl;dr: If you are so worried about for-profit corporations buying elections, why not pass a law that is narrowly-tailored to prevent just that, without going after someone who creates a kickstarter for their latest documentary "Trump: the Orange Menace"?
All of this Citizens United stuff kinda rests on the assumption that money in politics actually has much of an effect at all.
From what I've read it doesn't really change the outcomes anyway; e.g. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) conducted this study where he controlled for the fact that politicians who are more likely to win get more donations in the first place, and concluded that extra campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes.
This is a very narrow view that ignores second order effects. If I know this is how the system works, I'm not even going to consider representing positions that will attract no donations, because the donators have no interest in advancing those positions. I can't just campaign with no money, because the function of the money is to make people aware that I'm running and get me in their mind in the first place.
I feel like someone like Steven Levitt is probably a smart person, who has surely thought of this very obvious dynamic, and it really makes me question his sincerity on anything else he has to say.
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