By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.
It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.
Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority apparently agreed.
"The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.
However, Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting from the main holding, said, "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation."
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens' dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.
Nice headfake throwing Unions in there with the gigantic corporations, "liberal media." The truth is that unions only have a tiny fraction of the power to buy ads and fund astro-turf organizations with benign sounding names to influence elections. It's like putting Payton Manning and the Colts in a Pop Warner game and pretending it will be close.
We are truly fucked, thanks to five corporate cock-suckers on the high court, and the legacy of the Bushes is writ large now - we are a corporate state now, and there isn't a fucking thing we can do about it.
