> [Citizens United] was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.
Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people would disagree with as "pretty clearly correct" and stating an alternative as if it is the only alternative, that is not what many people think the alternative would be, is only going to raise hackles. It's not going to spur any new thought or interesting dicussion.
Unfortunately, many knowledgeable and intelligent people have failed to look into CU from any angle other than the one it is usually presented from: that is is about corporate spending on elections.
Which it is, but as the GP described, it's about a lot more than that.
I happen to think it was incorrectly decided - SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending. It would have left the door open to not-for-profit corporations still being free to spend money on e.g. publishing a book about a candidate within some date of an election, which is precisely what we want not-for-profit civic organizations (which are, you may recall, also corporations).
However, it really is "pretty clearly correct" that had SCOTUS simply ruled that "no corporation can <X>" (for various values of X), we would be an extremely different and probably much worse situation than we were before CU. Whether it would be worse than the one we're in post-CU is hard to say.
> SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending.
It's not obvious how that would have made any difference when a for-profit corporation could just give the money it wants to spend to an aligned non-profit to spend it in the same way. Unless you mean to prevent them from donating money to the non-profit, but then where is a non-profit supposed to derive funding? "All political speech can be funded only by government grants" has a pretty clear conflict of interest, and you would then somehow have to deal with for-profit entities that inherently engage in political speech like newspapers and cable news networks. Why should Comcast/MSNBC or Fox be able to dedicate unlimited airtime to political advocacy but not Intel or Ford?
Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people would disagree with as "pretty clearly correct" and stating an alternative as if it is the only alternative, that is not what many people think the alternative would be, is only going to raise hackles. It's not going to spur any new thought or interesting dicussion.