One of my friends from law school wrote a paper on this exact topic. The horrible thing is that Kavanaugh's ruling, allowing foreign governments to take sides in American elections, is the logical conclusion of the Citizens United decision.
Citizens United says that it isn't the speaker that matters, it is the speech that matters. So whether that is coming from a single voter or a well-funded corporation, all speech is going into the 'marketplace of ideas' and will be considered and evaluated regardless of who said it. So they invalidated a rule that forbid companies and other organizations from using general funds on political ads and whatnot within a certain period of time before an election.
If you follow that same chain of thought, then the identity of the speaker doesn't matter at all, even if it is a foreign national. It would still be the speech itself that matters.
Which is why Citizens United is such a dumb decision. It could maybe work in a world in which we have perfect access to information so that we are able to know exactly who is speaking and what their motivation is, and where all citizens have the desire to know and understand that information instead of just passively absorbing advertising. But that's not the world we live in. The justices just completely ignored what a corrupting influence this has on our electoral system.
bergerac121 on September 24th, 2018 at 13:56 UTC »
Well that is just a side perk one of the main is his general opinion that the president is more or less above the law
Cunt_Shit on September 24th, 2018 at 14:13 UTC »
Rapist? check
Works for Putin? check
Republican? check
SongOfUpAndDownVotes on September 24th, 2018 at 15:05 UTC »
One of my friends from law school wrote a paper on this exact topic. The horrible thing is that Kavanaugh's ruling, allowing foreign governments to take sides in American elections, is the logical conclusion of the Citizens United decision.
Citizens United says that it isn't the speaker that matters, it is the speech that matters. So whether that is coming from a single voter or a well-funded corporation, all speech is going into the 'marketplace of ideas' and will be considered and evaluated regardless of who said it. So they invalidated a rule that forbid companies and other organizations from using general funds on political ads and whatnot within a certain period of time before an election.
If you follow that same chain of thought, then the identity of the speaker doesn't matter at all, even if it is a foreign national. It would still be the speech itself that matters.
Which is why Citizens United is such a dumb decision. It could maybe work in a world in which we have perfect access to information so that we are able to know exactly who is speaking and what their motivation is, and where all citizens have the desire to know and understand that information instead of just passively absorbing advertising. But that's not the world we live in. The justices just completely ignored what a corrupting influence this has on our electoral system.