AT Citizens United CP - Michigan 7 2023 CPSW

Affirmative
Citizens United Good
Citizens United upheld liberty and corporation rights
Scott Casleton 18, [Scott works in political philosophy, ethics, and the history of philosophy and is a writer for Vox. “It’s time for liberals to get over Citizens United”, Vox, 2018, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/7/17325486/citizens-united-money-politics-dark-money-vouchers-primaries] Zulfiqar
Let’s put the hated decision into context. The inundation of elections with private cash is not the result of Citizens but rather was facilitated by the 1976 decision Buckley v. Valeo. That case established the legal framework sanctioning billions of dollars of independent private campaign spending. In it, the Court ruled that limits on campaign donations — direct donations to candidates — are constitutional but said it was unconstitutional to limit non-donation expenditures, such as independently funded advertisements.
Such independent spending — which cannot be coordinated with candidates, according to the Court — was protected under the First Amendment as not just speech but political speech. The idea is that money is a necessary instrument for supporting a political candidate, whether it’s paying for yard signs or taking out an ad in the newspaper. Not unreasonably, the Court ruled that limitations on independent expenditures would constitute limitations on one’s ability to support a candidate through any number of media. Placing a dollar limit on such expenditures would arbitrarily prevent certain kinds of campaign support simply by the fact of how expensive they are. Our inability to trace campaign donations to their source — the dark money issue — is the result of the lack of federal regulations to make disclosure mandatory. And such regulations are legal; the Court said as much in Citizens, with eight of nine justices agreeing on that point! The only thing standing in the way of transparency is congressional stonewalling. In 2010, Republican senators defeated a disclosure law 59 to 39, which would have made it more difficult for donors to use legal loopholes to hide their identities.
Citizens simply has not had the seismic legal impact that many think. Since Buckley protected money as speech, the only question was whether corporations were legitimate speakers. It may surprise some to hear, but the Court had already answered this question in 1978. In First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Supreme Court recognized a corporate right to free speech, concluding that the value of speech in the course of political debate does not depend on the identity of the speaker. Citizens simply followed the precedent of these two cases.
So when liberals intone that “corporations aren’t people,” thinking they are making a knock-down argument against Citizens, they miss the point. Citizens did not make corporations persons. And corporations do not need to be persons to receive First Amendment protections. Citizens upheld the liberty, provided by Bellotti, of corporations to speak, and they speak under the rules provided by Buckley.
The details were debated by expert lawyer Floyd Abrams and First Amendment scholar Burt Neuborne not long after Citizens came down. Abrams noted that even the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting, recognized that the Court has “long since held that Corporations are covered by the First Amendment.”
No solvency - Inequality
Campaign finance reform furthers inequality.
Atzmon ’23 [Yael Atzmon; editor at the Michigan Journal of Economics; “Op-Ed: Why Limiting Campaign Spending Will Not Resolve Political Inequality,” Michigan Journal of Economics; May 7, 2023; https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/05/07/op-ed-why-limiting-campaign-spending-will-not-resolve-political-inequality/; accessed 7/16/2023 // achan]
Every election cycle, televisions all over the country are subject to an endless barrage of campaign related media. Nowadays, campaigns require an inane amount of funds and resources to produce the kind of advertisements that flood American media outlets. While activists and policymakers propose straight-forward policy that limits campaign expenditure, the implementation of such policy can further entrench political inequality. Instead, Americans should consider the complete dynamics of campaign finance in order to design more effective campaign finance reform. While campaigning has never been a cheap endeavor, the court case Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission (2010) completely dismantled limits on campaign financing activity for unions and corporations. This new decision has contributed to a massive increase in campaign spending over the years through the creation of PACs and Super PACs (Arke & Robinson, 2019). PACs and Super PACs are specific types of political committees that “raise or spend more than $1,000 to influence the outcome of a federal election in a calendar year and [are] thus required to register with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)” (paras. 2-3). While PACs have a limit on the amount they are able to accept from any individual, Super PACs do not have this limit. Dark Money Groups are 501(c)(4) and c(6) organizations that can accept unlimited contributions as long as this is not considered their primary activity. They are allowed to contribute to Super PACs but not directly to a candidate (CLC, 2018). Although campaign finance has been fueled by more money recently, this phenomenon alone might not be cause for huge alarm. After all, the increase could be attributed to more participation in campaign funding efforts, perhaps through PACs. There are darker implications to this increase when we consider that those involved in raising money for political campaigns are not completely representative of the American public. According to Sean Mcelwee et. al (n.d.), “91 percent of federal election donors in 2012 and 92 percent of donors in 2014 were white” (p. 1) and white men specifically “comprise 45 percent of donors and account for 57 percent of money contributed” (p.2). This overrepresentation of certain demographic groups is especially concerning when paired with evidence that being a donor can lead to greater access to elected officials once they are in office. Indeed, “senior policy makers made themselves available between three and four times more often” for individuals they knew were campaign donors (p. 545) (Kalla & Broockman, 2016). If donors, who are mostly white men, are able to speak with policy makers and thus make their voices louder in the political process, the current campaign finance system seems antithetical to democracy. The majority of Americans (77%) apparently agrees and believes that “there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and groups can spend on campaigns” (para. 3) (Jones, 2018). Yes, something must be done. However, simply mandating limits on contributions is an extremely contrived solution to a very complex issue. While it is easy to assume that enforcing expenditure limits will reduce the influence of money across the board, the evidence suggests that this is simply not the case. The differentiation in campaign spending impact is especially potent when examining the usefulness of campaign spending value for incumbents and challengers distinctively. While spending more money leads to a higher incidence of success, on average, for challengers, the same is not true for incumbents (Vavreck, 2014). The explanation for this can be drawn to a basic economic concept: decreasing marginal returns for every dollar spent. In introductory economics, this means that the more a consumer buys, the less value they will get out of each additional good. The same logic applies to campaign finance, at least for incumbents. For incumbents, each additional dollar they spent is yielding less and less value in terms of helping them win their race. For challengers however, the more money they spend, the more likely they are to win (Vavreck, 2014). Incumbents benefit less from campaign spending partially because they are already familiar to voters. Conversely, challengers need to make themselves known in order to compete and thus profit politically from the extra spending (Vavreck, 2014). Thus, any kind of campaign finance that limits the amount of money being spent on campaigns point blank, will likely hinder challengers from overcoming incumbents. In this way, limiting the amount of money spent on campaigns could have unintended adverse effects and may even conglomerate power into the hands of those already in office. Additionally, simply limiting the amount of money being spent on campaigns will not address the fundamental issue which is not necessarily how much is being spent but rather who, and who is not, able to spend money in this way.
No solvency - Democracy
Citizens United saved democracy – 7 warrants – make them respond to each.
Blackburn ’20 [Scott Blackburn; Harvard graduate, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, veteran; January 16, 2020; “Citizens United After 10 Years: More Speech, Better Democracy”; https://www.ifs.org/research/citizens-united-after-10-years-more-speech-better-democracy/; accessed 7/10/23 // achan]
On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited corporations and labor unions from independently voicing their support or opposition to federal candidates. That law, the Court said, violated those organizations’ First Amendment rights. In the succeeding ten years, the Court’s decision in Citizens United has engendered more discussion and disagreement among policymakers than perhaps any other case in recent history. With ten years and five election cycles of hindsight, this report examines what we can learn from the effects of Citizens United on American campaigns. I. Since Citizens United, Politics Is More Diverse and Political Change Is Rapid. One common prediction about Citizens United was that it would fundamentally distort our elections in favor of wealthy interests. As The New York Times wrote in their editorial following the decision, “With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century… If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.” But far from an era dominated by the wealthy, in the five election cycles since the decision, America has seen some of the most vibrant, diverse, and rapid political change in a generation. We have seen the re-election of the first black President, Barack Obama, a Democrat, over business favorite Mitt Romney. This was followed by a celebrity outsider Republican in Donald Trump beating consummate Washington insider Hillary Clinton. The House of Representatives has seen similar rapid change with both Republicans and Democrats taking the House in populist waves. This is perhaps best exemplified by major establishment power brokers Eric Cantor and Joe Crowley being bested by political neophytes and outsiders David Brat and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, respectively. It is impossible to ascribe any one electoral outcome solely to Citizens United, but the prevalence of new voices in the political arena since the decision is undeniable. At the very least, it seems highly unlikely that if powerful moneyed interests were putting their finger on the scale of elections to a greater degree post-Citizens United, these are the outcomes they would have sought. II. Incumbents and Challengers Have Both Benefited From Super PAC Support – but the Support Helps Challengers More. Supporters of Citizens United, far from believing the decision hindered democratic ideals, regarded it as a boon to democracy by allowing political outsiders to more easily challenge incumbents and the status quo. As famed First Amendment attorney *chart/graph omitted* Floyd Abrams put it, “We want, for example, more Gene McCarthys and Ross Perots and individuals to come upon the scene and have a chance to build a war chest and go on out and try to reform the country as they think best.” The elections since the decision have certainly seen a significant amount of new blood in Washington, many of whom benefited from super PAC spending that was not tied to the traditional levers of party power. But incumbent politicians and insiders also quickly learned to take advantage of this new tool of campaigning. The best example of this is perhaps Right to Rise, the super PAC set up by supporters of Jeb Bush heading into the 2016 Republican primary. That group spent over $120 million peppering primary states with pro-Bush ads. But while Right to Rise bought a lot of ads, it failed to convince many voters. Super PACs supporting newcomers have had better success, as groups like Independent USA PAC and Women Vote! were able to give key support to previously unknown candidates. All told, the five election cycles since Citizens United saw an average of 79 freshmen members of Congress. The five cycles prior to the decision saw just 55. III. For-Profit Corporations Are Not Big Spenders in Campaigns. In the immediate wake of Citizens United, the main prediction from those opposed to the decision concerned corporate spending in elections. As one commentator put it, “today’s decision does far more than simply provide Fortune 500 companies with a massive megaphone to blast their political views to the masses; it also empowers them to drown out any voices that disagree with them.” Simply put, this has not happened. Corporate political spending continues to be dwarfed by spending from other traditional sources. In the four cycles since the decision, for-profit corporate political spending has averaged around 1% of spending from all sources. The following chart below shows total campaign contributions to any entity – candidates, political parties, standard PACs, super PACs, and other groups) (in blue), total contributions to independent groups from any source (including individuals, PACs, corporations, and unions) (in orange), and for-profit corporate contributions to independent groups (predominantly super PACs) (in red). *graph omitted* Even the roughly 1% of corporate contributions to super PACs each cycle likely overstates things, at least in the common understanding of Fortune 500 companies. As the Sunlight Foundation reported in 2014, “As far as we can tell, one thing the [200 largest corporations] did not do, for the most part, was take advantage of the new opportunities to spend on politics that the Citizens United decision afforded them. The 200 corporate donors gave just $3 million to super PACs, with the bulk of that amount a single $2.5 million donation from Chevron” to one particular super PAC. In 2018, The Washington Post looked at the top 50 donors for that election cycle and found similar results: just four were nonpersons, and they gave just 3% of the total donations from that group. Of those four corporate donors, two were nontraditional. One was a group that advocates on behalf of hospitals, and one was the company of longtime political activist Ross Perot. No matter how you slice it, Citizens United has not led to a flood of corporate money in our elections. IV. Money Still Can’t “Buy” an Election. Despite a near constant drumbeat from some politicians and activist groups, in the post-Citizens United era, money cannot and does not buy elections. In fact, this is conventional wisdom among most experts. As University of Missouri professor Jeff Milyo wrote: [T]here is something of a scholarly consensus . . . stand[ing] in stark contrast to the popular wisdom so often echoed by pundits, politicians and reform advocates that elections are essentially for sale to the highest bidder (spender). Decades of social science research consistently reveal a far more limited role for campaign spending. Since 2010, this truism has been demonstrated again and again, from the spectacular failure of deep-pocketed Jeb Bush to the meteoric rise of the heavily outspent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It is true, both before and after Citizens United, that the candidate who spends more money usually wins, but while spending certainly helps campaigns, it does not cause the victory. Rather, candidates who attract more voters typically also attract more donors. The inability of spending to “buy” votes on Election Day is easiest to see in the almost cliché trend of rich individuals self-funding lavish campaigns and underperforming when actual votes are counted, sometimes spectacularly so. As Richard Lau, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, put it, “I think where you have to change your thinking is that money causes winning. I think it’s more that winning attracts money.” V. Most Campaign Spending Still Comes From Limited Contributions by Individuals to Candidates. The emergence of super PACs – political groups that exclusively make independent expenditures and therefore can accept contributions of any size – has been the largest and most significant innovation of the Citizens United decision. (Though technically it was a different case – SpeechNow.org v. FEC – that permitted the creation of super PACs, that unanimous decision followed the reasoning of Citizens United.) And it is true that super PAC spending has been increasing, as more and more groups see the advantages of independent speech. Nevertheless, the overall impact of super PACs has been overstated. At the time of the decision, it was argued that, “[those] players with the deepest pockets will be able to pay premium prices for as many ads as they want, easily dominating the airwaves.” But significantly more political spending is funded by donors that must abide by strict contribution limits, namely those who give to candidates and political parties. Contributions to super PACs have ranged from 12% to 26% of total political contributions over the four cycles since Citizens United. Candidates and political parties continue to outspend super PACs by at least three-to-one. *chart omitted* It’s also worth remembering that federal law automatically gives candidates the lowest cost for a political ad on TV or radio, meaning a dollar of super PAC spending buys less speech than the same dollar of candidate spending. VI. The Government Cannot Ban Political Books or Movies. Most forgotten in the decade since Citizens United is the actual speech the Court protected. The case was about political speech in its purest form and the government’s belief that it could regulate and prohibit that speech. Citizens United is a nonprofit corporation that, in 2008, wanted to advertise and sell on-demand a documentary critical of then-Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission said doing so would be illegal, because it was funded by a corporation, and any corporate spending that supports, opposes, or even mentions a candidate close to an election is prohibited (unless the speaker is a media corporation). In defending that position, the government went further, arguing to the Supreme Court that it could prohibit companies from publishing books that contained a single line advocating for or against a candidate. Those were the facts before the Supreme Court Justices when they issued their ruling. A rule that bans this speech must be inconsistent with the First Amendment. As Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in the majority’s opinion: “political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it.” Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, companies like Netflix and Amazon don’t have to worry about streaming political documentaries during election season, small publishing houses don’t have to hire a campaign finance attorney before publishing political books, and the government is one step further removed from policing political speech. VII. There is More Speech About Candidates Now Than Ever Before. By legalizing corporate and union independent expenditures and paving the way for super PA

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