Today during the Soliciter General Elena Kagen's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Senator Hatch (R-UT) was drilling her about the landmark court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Can one of you briefly summarize thise case?
What significant Constitutional issues did this case address?
http://cspan.org/Special/Supreme-Court-Kagan-Senate-Confirmation-Hearing-34793.aspx
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Basically, Citizens United wanted to publish a movie opposing Hillary Clinton. the FEC stopped them under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), and when Citizens United appealed to their First Amendment right to freedom of expression, they were not successful, do to the bias of "Hillary: The Movie" against Hillary Clinton as President. The BCRA disallowed any corporation, labor union, etc. from "electioneering communication".
ReplyDelete[Tried to post on 7/21 but didn’t realize until now that it was unsuccessful.]
ReplyDeleteI’ll cover the case and then go onto some opinion because I find this quite interesting.
Citizens United was a small non-profit organization that desired to create a bias film not in favor of Hillary Clinton near to primary election time as she was running for President. This appeared to be a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act aka McCain-Feingold Act. The basis of going to the Supreme Court would be to see if CU’s First Amendment rights were being violated. The Court ultimately ruled that BCRA stood, and they decreed that “electronic communications” were not protected. So, the documentary never aired and this left all companies in general still with the right to personally give money to candidates, as individuals may, and show their support in that manner.
Kagan and Hatch are decidedly on opposite sides of this decision, but the drilling of Hatch is not successful when both keep repeating their own opinions and not really clarifying why their own is better than the others. I’m not surprised that Hatch’s vote for her nomination was eventually a “Nay”. However, both need not fear government being tyrannical and taking over the voices of the people [within the companies] because as mentioned before, they may give money via direct contributions.
I feel that the outcome of this case is inconsistent with the decision in February of this year regarding a student’s right to post negative opinions about her teacher on Facebook. In the CU vs FEC case, Amy said that “electronic communications” are not protected by the first amendment. However, it seems to me that a similar ruling should have been made regarding Facebook. The confusion comes up because the technologies we have developed in the past decade are greater than any of the founding fathers had imagined. Our challenge now is to find the correct or acceptable way to interpret the Constitution regarding these new technologies and methods of expressing ourselves.
ReplyDeleteThis case of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission was a brutal case seemed to combat the First Amendment’s promise of freedom of speech and freedom of press. A company named Citizens United tried to air a video critical of Hillary Clinton before the election that could have led her to the presidency. The Federal Election Commission tried to combat and protect Clinton’s rights to a clean election slate, yet Citizens United wanted to show their film Hillary: The Movie.
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.heritage.org/2010/01/21/citizens-united-v-fec-a-landmark-decision-in-favor-of-free-speech/
I believe this site does a good job of explaining the controversy of this jumbled case. Because of the blow that American freedoms would take if the Court sided with the FEC, they voted on behalf of Citizens United.
This is great!
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