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A bitterly divided Supreme Court vastly
increased the power of big business and unions to influence
government decisions Thursday by freeing them to spend money directly to sway elections for president and Congress.


      The ruling reversed a century-long trend to limit the political
muscle of corporations, organized labor and their massive war
chests. It also recast the political landscape just as crucial
midterm election campaigns are getting under way.
     

 In its sweeping 5-4 ruling, the court set the stage for a wave
of likely repercussions - from new pressures on lawmakers to heed
special interest demands to increasingly boisterous campaigns
featuring highly charged ads that drown out candidate voices.
     

 The election-season blizzard of ads on Americans TV screens is
bound to increase.
     

 While the full consequences of the decision were hard to
measure, politicians made clear whom they believed benefited.
Democrats, led by President Barack Obama, condemned the decision
while Republicans cheered it.
 

     Still, more labor and corporate money in the political system
could dilute the role of both political parties.
   

   And the decision seeded the ground for further challenges to an
already weakened system of campaign finance regulations.
      

The justices weighed two fundamental political forces - the
power of the central government and the concentration of corporate
wealth - and tilted decidedly in favor of the latter. 


The opinion
by Justice Anthony Kennedy made a vigorous argument based on the
Constitution for the right of the public to be exposed to a
multitude of ideas and against the ability of government to limit
political speech, even in the interest of fighting corruption.


      "The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach," Kennedy
wrote.


      Strongly dissenting, Justice John Paul Stevens said, "The
court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected
institutions around the nation."


      Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin
Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Kennedy to form the majority in
the main part of the case. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen
Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens' dissent, parts of which
he read aloud in the courtroom.


      The court overturned two earlier decisions and threw out parts
of a 63-year-old law that said companies and unions can be
prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to
produce and run their own campaign ads urging the election or
defeat of particular candidates by name. 


The decision, which
applies to independent spending that is not coordinated with
candidates, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.


      The justices also struck down part of the landmark
McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and
corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.


      It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to
candidates from corporations and unions, and didn't touch the
McCain-Feingold ban on unlimited corporate and union donations to
political parties. Nor did it disturb companies' right to solicit
voluntary contributions to political action committees that can
donate directly to candidates.

      Corporations and unions would still have to identify the sources
of money for their political activity - a provision of current law
that the court upheld in an 8-1 vote.
      


Obama called the decision a victory for big oil, Wall Street
banks, health insurance companies and other powerful interests.
     

 The ruling will lead to a "stampede of special interest money
in our politics," Obama said. He pledged to work with Democrats
and Republicans in Congress to come up with a "forceful response"
to the high court's action.


      But Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican
leader who filed the first lawsuit challenging the McCain-Feingold
law, praised the court for "restoring the First Amendment rights"
of corporations and unions. 


"By previously denying this right, the
government was picking winners and losers," McConnell said.


      Kennedy's opinion goes to the heart of laws dating back to the
Gilded Age, when Congress passed the Tillman Act in 1907 banning
corporations from donating money directly to federal candidates.

Though that prohibition still stands, the same can't be said for
much of the century-long effort that followed to separate politics
from corporate money.


      Campaign lawyers and political operatives immediately began
contemplating the consequences of the decision.
      

Its most immediate effect is to permit corporate and
union-sponsored political ads to run right up to the moment of an
election, and to allow them to call explicitly for the election or
defeat of a candidate. 

In presidential elections and in close
congressional contests, that could substantially increase the
television advertising competing for the public attention's with
the candidates' own ads.

      "It's going to be the Wild Wild West," said Ben Ginsberg, a
Republican attorney who has represented several GOP presidential
campaigns. 


"If corporations and unions can give unlimited amounts
... it means that the public debate is significantly changed with a
lot more voices and it means that the loudest voices are going to
be corporations and unions."


      The legal community was split over whether corporations or
unions would be the biggest beneficiaries.


      "I'd be surprised if it opens new express advocacy by big
publicly traded corporations," said Joseph Birkenstock, a former
chief counsel for the Democratic National Committee.


      Big firms, sensitive to the feelings of many shareholders and
customers, not to mention Congress, would be less inclined to affix
their name to a hard-hitting negative ad calling for a candidate's
defeat.


      Instead, corporations, large or small, may be more likely to
funnel their cash to broad industry groups, and let them mount
political campaigns that keep individual corporate fingerprints off
the effort. Indeed, trade associations already weigh in
politically; the court's decision will simply empower them to be
more explicit closer to election day.
     


 But unions would also benefit. The AFL-CIO filed a friend of the
court brief calling for more freedom to run political ads. Labor
organizations have a long history of political activity. In last
year's presidential election, they ran millions of dollars in ads
that stopped short of calling for a candidate's election or defeat.
But their intent was clear.


      "Given how extensively many unions are involved in various
aspects of the election process, such as get-out-the-vote drives
and the like, there seems little doubt that these same unions will
have strong motivation to now engage in election-related
independent spending," said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law
professor at the New York University.

      Emboldened by the ruling, critics of campaign finance regulation
may now challenge the ban on direct corporate donations to
candidates.


      "If all speakers are going to be treated the same, why wouldn't
a corporation be able to make a contribution to a candidate just
like a PAC or an unincorporated association or an individual?"
said James Bopp Jr., a campaign finance lawyer who has fought
limits on political money.

      The decision also may strengthen political party groups that
seek to end the McCain-Feingold ban on unlimited contributions to
parties from labor and corporations.

      Stevens, in a 90-page opinion that dwarfed Kennedy's, complained
that the court majority overreached by throwing out earlier Supreme
Court decisions that had not been at issue when this case first
came to the court.


      "Essentially, five justices were unhappy with the limited
nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give
themselves an opportunity to change the law," Stevens said.

      The case began when a conservative group, Citizens United, made
a 90-minute movie critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton as she sought
the Democratic presidential nomination. Citizens United wanted to
air ads for the movie and distribute it through video-on-demand
services on local cable systems during the 2008 Democratic primary
campaign.

      But federal courts said the movie looked and sounded like a long
campaign ad, and therefore should be regulated like one.
    

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A bitterly divided Supreme Court vastly
increased the power of big business and unions to influence government decisions Thursday, by freeing them to spend money directly to sway elections for president and Congress.

Biz, unions freed to spend big on elections

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