For the fourth and final installment of our month-long collaboration with the This Day podcast, we go to 2010 and the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision—which enshrined corporate spending as protected speech and unleashed a new era of dark money in American politics. This Day hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, to trace how we got here: from the Tillman Act of 1907 through Watergate, the FEC, the McCain-Feingold Act, and the long effort to keep corporate money out of elections. How much of the problem predates Citizens United, and how much did that ruling change everything? Be sure to check out the League of Women Voters at lwv.org and their voter information resource at vote411.org. Learn more about this special series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/ If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to all episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show Attention, Washington, DC-area listeners! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. The Context host, Alex Lovit, will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one? The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct
Alex Lovit:
Hello listeners, Alex Lovit again. Today we're bringing you our fourth and final episode in our month-long special series. If you're just tuning in, you don't need to go back and start at the beginning, but we do hope you'll check out the whole series. And once again, on October 19th, we're doing a live recording in Washington DC featuring Kettering Senior Fellow, the Reverend Dr. William Barber II. If you're in the area, join us at the Howard Theater for a live taping of this day. There's a link in the show notes to buy tickets and to this day's podcast feed. And now here's the episode. Enjoy.
Jody Avrigan:
Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avrigan. This is 50 Weeks That Shaped America, our semiquincentennial look at the moments in history that brought us to this moment, 250 years into the American experiment. And as listeners know, all this month we have been doing a collaboration with the Kettering Foundation. We're calling it Democracy Under Construction. We've been looking at some of the key moments throughout US history when American democracy has expanded, contracted, realigned, been contested. We've talked about the Bill of Rights, Seneca Falls, Southern Realignment. Listeners will note that we've been going in chronological order. So today, one of the more recent consequential moments that shaped our modern democracy, the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, which enshrined the idea that corporate spending is protected speech and unleashed a slew of dark money spending in our modern politics.
It was one of those vintage five-four decisions. We are certainly living in the shadow of all sorts of five-four decisions these days, but this is our chance to talk about money and politics. This week in two parts, we will get into the history of dark money, how Citizens United the case went down and what it all means for our democracy. Here as always, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt and Kellie Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.
Nicole Hemmer:
Hello, Jody.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Hey there.
Jody Avrigan:
Kellie's health under construction a little bit. You're bouncing back from a... Yeah.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Just a little bit.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah. Excuse the sniffles everyone, but podcasting must go on. And our special guest this week, we are so excited to be joined by Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters. I'll talk a little bit about the organization and why we're so excited to have you on, but Celina, thank you so much for doing this.
Celina Stewart:
Thank you. Hi, everybody.
Jody Avrigan:
Hello there. So yeah, the League of Women Voters, nonpartisan voter education, voter rights organization. You do all sorts of amazing work around elections and voting rights as well as campaign finance reform. So it's no surprise that LWV and Kettering and us are all pals because we are all interested in democracy and-
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Preserving it.
Jody Avrigan:
Preserving it and the health of it and so forth. But I will also say on a personal level, your voter guides are my go-to thing when I'm about to head into the ballot box. So I appreciate you and all your work and all your advocacy. And Kellie, were you saying you're a...
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, I'm a member.
Jody Avrigan:
All right.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
I've done some work for the League of Women Voters and so they gave me a little picture frame with the membership card in it and it's like one of those vintage membership cards. I was like, "Oh my God, I love this." So very, very special, especially in Boston.
Nicole Hemmer:
We have a healthy League of Women Voters chapter here in Nashville as well, which I have had the great fortune of working with and I'm such a fan of the organization, so it's really amazing to have you here.
Celina Stewart:
Thank you. Thank you.
Jody Avrigan:
All right. Well, Celina, thank you for all your work and thanks for joining us as we talk about Citizens United. We will get into how it all went down, the arguments, the decision, and obviously the fallout. But I wonder if you could start with a sort of bigger story or bigger picture, which is obviously we're here in America's 250th year. We're framing a lot of this around the semiquincentennial. Do you have initial framing thoughts about this question of money in politics and how enmeshed it has been into the American experiment over these last 250 years? I mean, was it something the founders were actively thinking about? Do you see it as a through line?
Celina Stewart:
I do. The League is a national organization. We are in all 50 states plus DC and over 800 local and state Leagues around the country. I feel like we are everywhere. I feel like we are the eyes and ears of democracy in so many ways. But I think the League's story is that this decision in particular accelerated this long-running democratic problem, which is when wealth can be converted into political power without some meaningful transparency for guardrails. I think when that happens, voters begin to doubt where the government is responsive to them and the League opposed the decision while it was in court. We condemned it when the ruling was issued, and we've spent years since pushing for disclosure, stronger enforcement of campaign finance laws and limits on Super PAC influence and things like that. But I think this tension between wealth, power and democracy as this self-government is as old as our American experiment, 250 years. But the nation's founders did not really face Super PAC.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
No way.
Celina Stewart:
Or like modern campaign spending, but they were deeply concerned about things like corruption, powerful special interest groups. You can see that with how the constitution is constructed. This concentration of power, they did so many things to avoid that. And really it was this question about whether government would serve the public good or whether it would ever serve these few special interests. I think that the constitution tried to avoid that. I think when we think about these founding ideas, it gives us two principles that are often intention, this broad freedom of political expression and this commitment to our republic that government must be accountable to the people. Citizens United sits really directly in that tension. I think for the League, the question is whether ordinary voters can still see who's trying to influence them, whether candidates can compete without this dependence on a tiny set of wealthy interests or wealthy people, whether democracy really remains grounded in this idea that people are centered or whether money, wealthy individuals are centered.
Jody Avrigan:
It's funny, we'll get to this, but both the dissent and the opinion refer to the founders and kind of couch themselves in the founder's intention. We'll read a little bit from that when we get to it, but any other initial thoughts from Nikki or Kellie and then we'll get into some of the history here?
Nicole Hemmer:
Well, I do love that framing of accountability to the people being such a core part of how small D democracy is constructed. Even though that's been imperfect over the course of US history, that has been a central aspirational value. In thinking about accountability, a ton of money and politics is a way of sidestepping that democratic process because there are other routes to power than the support of the people and that then becomes just an enormous problem. I'm obsessed with this idea of accountability in politics right now and thinking about the way that corporations impinge on that.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Just maybe writing a book about it. No, I think all of that is so spot on. The idea that... I mean, we've been doing so much on the 250th and thinking so much about we, the people and these sort of original ideas that the founders had. And to fast-forward two centuries and a half and to see how much wealth, exorbitant amounts of wealth that the founding fathers could not have even fathomed, billions of dollars going into these campaigns, this was not at all the intent nor the goal of what they envisioned. And so in some ways it just reminds me of how far away we've moved from some of the things that they were trying to steer clear of.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah. We will get also, of course, to this central question and idea and legal argument of whether corporations are indeed people and have the same speech rights as people, which is really kind of what this rested on and also the big idea I think that this injected into this, or maybe not injected, but certainly we can see this ruling as the culmination of that argument. So actually let's trace the kind of arguments about money and power that built over the course of the, let's say 20th century, leading up to the moment we're marking here, which is around 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 with Citizens United. But Nikki, you want to take us through a little story of how this country of ours has tried to wrestle with questions of money and politics?
Nicole Hemmer:
Indeed. I mean, we have to go back to our problematic faves back in the progressive era who are looking at the scene and seeing a concentration of wealth that just had not been experienced in the United States before. An enormous explosion in wealth in the industrial era, and then the concentration of that wealth in the hands of corporations and a few very, very, very wealthy men and wealthy families. There was a real concern at the time that all of this money in politics was corrupting democracy. The populist movement, the progressive movement, they were pushing back against this and saying, "Well, it's illegitimate for corporations to have so much power in politics because it's corrupting and it's anti-democratic." Enough pressure builds that you actually get members of Congress to vote against their interests in some ways and to pass in 1907 the Tillman Act. This bans corporations from contributing to candidates.
Now, is it perfect? Oh, of course it's not perfect. There're giant loopholes. Individuals can donate as much as they want and they can get reimbursed by corporations-
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Which is wild.
Nicole Hemmer:
... just creating a little pass through there. But it's a start, first step toward the goal of freeing Congress from the power of money. Is Congress free from the power of money in the next decades? Not really.
Jody Avrigan:
It's the 1920s.
Nicole Hemmer:
It's the 1920s. Wealth inequality grows and grows in the United States. And even when that is reigned in some in the mid 20th century, corporations are working side by side with government, big business, big labor, and big government is kind of the triangle that is supporting US federal power. And so by the time you get to the 1970s, it's the same questions again. There's so much money in politics, there's so much corruption in politics, and now you have a new wave of reformers who are in Congress because of Richard Nixon, Watergate.
We think of Watergate as the break-in and the coverup, but there were actually a lot of campaign finance crimes involved too. A lot of people went to jail for campaign finance lawbreaking associated with Watergate. And so Congress passes the Federal Election Campaign Act, which sets up the Federal Election Commission, the FEC, and that creates the regulatory structure that... Do we still have it today, really? Hard to say, but now it will sound familiar. You might not know the Tillman Act, but you know the FEC.
Jody Avrigan:
Can I ask a sort of naive question of all of you? And Celina, maybe you can jump in here, but what is the reason that so many of these regulations and so much of this effort to curtail the power of corporations and money when politics lands on elections as opposed to the many other ways I can assume a rich person could influence the politics of the day? Why is elections the focus?
Celina Stewart:
Look, that's where power lies in the country, both at the federal, or not both, but at the federal, state and local level. Those are the people who make decisions about our everyday lives. And I don't know, when we talk about civics education, I think it's a perfect storm or imperfect storm, a horrible perfect storm. I don't know how to say it, but it's the taking away of civics that people don't understand actually who does what for them, who controls the road, who controls what you learn in school, who controls the money or the price of gas and housing and all of those things. With these federal laws that really are supposed to be the floor, this is our baseline level of coverage, laws, et cetera. I think that because of how powerful these people are, it makes sense to me that businesses would be like, "Let's go get close to power."
But the problem is that in a democracy, even a capitalistic one, people still have the opportunity and should have the opportunity to elect their elected officials and not be influenced unduly by businesses who do not consider their personhood when making decisions.
Nicole Hemmer:
If we go back to the founder's idea of democracy, if that's where we gain our legitimacy from, their idea was a democracy requires an informed public. There was this real concern, especially by the mid 20th century that television was being used to manipulate people and people were being malinformed or misinformed and that it was a real problem to pump a ton of money into elections because that money could be used to mislead people. I mean, it'd still be the person who won the most votes, but they would be sort of voted in on false pretenses.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes.
Celina Stewart:
Yes.
Jody Avrigan:
So interesting. So it's not just about buying, to put a crudely, politicians, but it's also about skewing the uninformed public.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Absolutely. And everyone knows that negative ad campaigns are most effective. So if you can even create doubt, it might not be necessarily true, but if you can get the person to believe, did you know that such and such or every time someone does, whatever it is, if there's any kind of language that can allude to a negative impact on the way the voter is influenced in thinking about a particular candidate, those things are insanely effective. And so by dumping a ton of money into that, there's no way you can sort of combat, at least if you're on the other side of it, that kind of avalanche of wealth and visibility and volume.
Celina Stewart:
The genius of what you're saying right now, but the huge problem that it creates is the average American sometimes doesn't know that they're encountering that type of information. They just think it's information because we're talking to people, they're just like, "Oh, that wasn't negative or positive. He was just telling us that this person's bad," or that you didn't vote for this person.
So they're just sometimes seeing it as just information without interrogating the bad or good. Now because of people like us, we're just like, "Oh no, that's bad because it does these things."
But I worry because I think that we're being pushed into a world where we are encouraged not to think, Not to critically think most importantly. And that creates issues because I think when people work all day, hopefully you love your job, but if you don't, sometimes TV is your outlet at the end of the day. So you're just watching TV and you get a barrage of information and your brain is just trying to absorb all the things. And so when you use that space and people don't always have or know what it means to encounter a negative ad or an ad that's meant to persuade you to have a negative association with a person, place or thing, how do you combat that?
Nicole Hemmer:
And not to jump too far ahead, but especially when most people aren't getting their information from television anymore, they're getting it from social media and things aren't ads in the same way. We kind of know what a political campaign ad looks like on television, so we kind of know that we're encountering advertising sometimes, but in this new media environment, we are just constantly getting stuff. And so you see a reel or you see a headline or a post on X and it creates an impression that's really sticky, but you don't go any further than that and you're left with this impressionistic view of what the world is.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes. And don't involve AI because then it's all around.
Jody Avrigan:
Listen, we'll get to all of that. And certainly I think this is why these questions of transparency around where the information is coming from, which is really a big part of Citizens United case are so critical or that's where so much of the regulation has tried to put up some guardrails. Nikki, you want to keep talking about some other 20th century regulations, then we can take another sort of step back, see where that landed us, and then we'll talk about Citizens United itself.
Nicole Hemmer:
Well, sure. I mean, one thing that we should say just to finish the FEC conversation is what they were doing was they were putting restrictions on money being spent and money being contributed to campaigns. They established public financing for presidential campaigns so you wouldn't have to rely on donor money. And then they were like, "Also, please don't use your campaign funds for personal stuff. Don't buy yourself a house with campaign funds."
Jody Avrigan:
That was the wording, please.
Nicole Hemmer:
They're like, "Don't do what Nixon did with his money. We'll be good."
But then just a few years later, the Supreme Court, who I think is the baddie in most of this conversation today, comes out with a ruling called Buckley v. Valeo. And the Buckley ruling is long. It's incomprehensible. It's the court coming through and it's applying the First Amendment to campaign finance. And it's saying that because of the First Amendment, Congress can't restrict campaign expenditures because spending money was like speech itself. Because in this modern world, every form of speech requires money behind it, whether it's printing a handbill or running a television ad. And basically it said campaigns can spend as much money as they want. That is their free speech right.
People can't contribute however much they want, however. It's still constitutional to regulate contributions. It's just campaigns have to be allowed to spend as much as they want. And so then you have a kind of arms race for how to get that money into a campaign, and you can do that sometimes by nominating people like Michael Bloomberg who can then self-finance his campaign. So it was kind of the first snapback against campaign finance.
Celina Stewart:
And that was out of the Watergate scandal stuff, right?
Nicole Hemmer:
So the Buckley v. Valeo, I think comes out of Jim Buckley's, his Senate campaign in 1970. But yes, it's all tied up in the conversation about campaign finance and reform. And then you don't really get another big push. I mean, you get attempts at getting campaign finance reform in the 1990s under Clinton, but it's really once you get John McCain in the catbird seat working with Russ Feingold in the early 2000s, that you do get a pretty significant piece of legislation, the McCain-Feingold law, that is trying to. You can still regulate the money officially coming into a campaign, but at the time you couldn't regulate money being donated to the party. This is soft money. And they were like, "But so much money is now being donated in unlimited amounts to the party." And then the party is creating ads for their candidates. So it's like a backdoor to finance campaigns and they're like, "We want to stamp out that soft money." So that's the big campaign finance reform that happens right before Citizens United.
Jody Avrigan:
Celina, do you have thoughts on any of those major reforms of the second half of the 20th century?
Celina Stewart:
I think it's good that people or the legislators were trying to do something, right? Obviously they saw this coming down the pipeline, but that always happens. Bad things happen and then we are forced to try to see around the corner to see what could come from. We've seen it in so many instances. Campaign finance, we saw redistricting, we're experiencing that now. But so often I think that Congress is in a proactive stance where they're like, "Oh my God, did you see what just happened? Maybe we should write a law about it to try to get one."
Nicole Hemmer:
Back when Congress was writing laws.
Celina Stewart:
Yes. Right now they're just sitting there with, "Well, what's that?"
But I do think there's some value in that, and I think that that's kind of where we're stuck now because the three branches of government are not actually functioning how intended. There's all this expansion, constriction, restrictions that are happening. And when those three branches don't operate completely independently, we get situations like what we had with Citizens United because the court completely blew up that case. It was actually about a movie, a movie where people wanted to be able to have political content in the movie, and then the court reheard the case and expanded the scope of it, which is how we got here. I think the McCain-Feingold, that was in early 2000s, right?
Nicole Hemmer:
2008. Yeah.
Celina Stewart:
It wasn't until 30 years later until people were just like, "Okay, this is getting out of control."
But if you look at the growth in campaign spending between that time, it had grown tremendously. I don't know the exact amount. I just know that it was millions upon millions that had been invested during that time. It was just like, okay, this small group of people, lobbyists, businesses, et cetera, are starting to influence. We could see the writing on the wall that the money spent was actually leading to people winning certain races. I think Congress stepping in saying, "Hey, we've got to put some restrictions on this," and then the court kind of blowing it up a little later is very telling.
Jody Avrigan:
But I like that idea of losing or atrophying just the dynamic between Congress and the real world and a kind of continual... It's like a game of cat and mouse where the cat fell asleep or whatever for 30 years. I mean, on that front, do you or any of you, but Celina, you can answer first. I mean, do you point to a moment, and since we just did this sweep of the 20th century, do you point to a moment in US history and say kind of, "We sort of had it figured out there. There was a good balance there between the power and the way that money influenced politics and the voice of the people and the way we ran our elections," or has it always been problematic in one way or another?
Celina Stewart:
I mean, I feel like it's something that we've always had to keep our eye on, especially as I think about when things started to really trip up, and it's when people had more access to money and moving money more quickly. It was also around the time that banks started to try more digital asseting. And so when I think about people's access to information, access to money, moving money more quickly, and also just wanting to influence politics generally, that the convergence of those things may have been the foundation to speed this along or the greased path to speed it along its way.
So we're a capitalistic society. There's always been a conversation about power in this country. It's always been the powerful and the powerless and very, very little in between that. I mean, we saw the evolution and the growth of the middle class, which was that middle area between wealth and poverty. But I think that when we think about the progression of politics, especially after Nixon and what we saw there, because as you said, Nikki, there were so many campaign finance laws outside of just the stuff that seemed very similar now. It's like we're living the same nightmare just several decades later. But I think all of those things kind of came together to put us where we were right before the Citizens United decision came out, kind of spurred that.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah. I also tend to think about who are the candidates that are being elected and how regular are they? Do you have sort of Joe Schmo candidate or you have these billionaires, multi-millionaires that are becoming governors, that are becoming senators, that are becoming congressmen? And that becomes, I think, really problematic in ways where it tells you, one, that the path to leadership requires an exorbitant amount of money, that you can't just be the regular guy that wants to run for office anymore. You have to have serious backing. And we've also done episodes and talked about how a lot of presidents were broke. They didn't have a lot of money or they didn't get their money until after they left office or something like that. But I think we're no longer looking at candidates that are sort of this started from the bottom, now we're here kind of moment where they are-
Celina Stewart:
Not throwing a rap lyric in there [inaudible 00:24:20].
Kellie Carter Jackson:
But this idea that we expect a lot of our candidates now to be moneyed. We expect them to not just be educated, but to be wealthy, to have these large pots of cash and influence. And that makes everything not just untenable, but unfeasible.
Nicole Hemmer:
And I think that Trump is kind of an inflection point in the sense that we expect our candidates to have a lot of money and we expect our candidates to be very famous because there are two ways to get attention in this economy, to buy it or to be able to suck all the oxygen out of the room. And Trump has both of those. And I think that's kind of what we're... It'll be interesting to see the kinds of candidates that rise to the top going forward if you can buy your way into the attention economy or if you have to have that special algorithmic sauce to do it.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes.
Celina Stewart:
Early 20th century, so 1900s, up until about the, I don't know, I don't want to lie here, '60s I think, you saw a lot of politicians who were like teachers, farmers, small business owners, veterans, local attorneys, so not these big, huge attorneys, et cetera. And then I think, Nikki, you mentioned this earlier with the evolution of TV. TV, you could see more. It put people more in contact with things. It wasn't just listening to people on the radio. It's like this, now we have TV, we can see the things. And then the dot-com era in the 2000s, where all of these self-made millionaires, people just started gaining a tremendous amount of wealth at younger ages, which allowed them to do more things. And so I think if we look just over the 20th century and then the 21st century, just how things evolved from people having access to things, who were politicians back then versus who it is now. It's pretty different.
Jody Avrigan:
Well, I mean, we're doing this America 250 moment. If I've learned anything about the founders, it's that most of them were farmers and wanted to mostly be farmers. And they were like, "Okay, every once in a while we'll get together and talk about politics and write some docs, but I really want to go back and just do the farming, and this should be a part-time thing."
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Unless you're a plantation owner.
Nicole Hemmer:
I was about to say-
Jody Avrigan:
Or Ben Franklin. A couple of them.
Nicole Hemmer:
... well, farmers. [inaudible 00:26:37] really did the planting.
Jody Avrigan:
Yeah, sure. But I do think-
Kellie Carter Jackson:
[inaudible 00:26:39] there was some of them farming.
Jody Avrigan:
Fair enough. I'm mostly joking here, but I do think this idea that politics is not the defining everything.
Nicole Hemmer:
Yes. Yes, for sure.
Jody Avrigan:
And moreover, I think something you're pointing out here, and it wasn't really part of Citizens United, but it's just such an important dynamic when we think about money and politics, is that you can have all these restrictions that we've been talking about on the spending, but then the flip side, as you said, Kellie, but then where does the money actually come from in order to provide a path for someone who is not monied independently to be able to enter politics? And it's always about figuring out both sides of that coin. And mostly I feel like our regulations have not been about more equal financing. It's mostly been about stamping down where the money is flowing in from. But let's turn to Citizens United itself. Celina, you kind of hinted at some of the dynamics of the case. And so let me lay out, and I always give the I'm not a lawyer caveat here, but of course we have a lawyer here, so that's very useful. But let me-
Celina Stewart:
[inaudible 00:27:42] finance lawyer.
Jody Avrigan:
Fair enough. Fair enough. But let me lay out the basic contours of it, and then of course we would talk about the decision and the fallout. But as you've kind of hinted at, the original Citizens United case was fairly narrow and it was about a 90-minute documentary about Hillary Clinton that was called Hillary: The Movie. And Nikki, are you the only one on here who's watched Hillary: The Movie? That's your world.
Nicole Hemmer:
That is my world. Yes. We're playing fast and loose with the word documentary here, but yes, I mean, it was a-
Jody Avrigan:
What's your Letterboxd rating for Hillary: The Movie?
Nicole Hemmer:
Right. If you've seen a Dinesh de Souza documentary, you've seen Hillary: The Movie. It's the same genre.
Jody Avrigan:
So Citizens United is this sort of conservative nonprofit organization. They make this movie Hillary: The Movie. They finance it. They want to run it during the Democratic primaries in 2008, when of course, as you remember, it's Hillary and Obama. They are no fans of Hillary. I think they're sort of flowing from the longstanding '90s sort of Clinton conspiracy theory world, and they want to run this on cable TV in the weeks leading up to the election, and they want to make it video on demand, but then also just give the option for cable networks to basically run it. And this comes into conflict with FEC regulations about basically running ads close to elections. And so the central question is pretty narrow. As you said, is this 90-minute documentary, should it be treated the same as a 30-second campaign ad, which of course would've limited when it could run and how it could run.
And so in March 2009, the case is initially argued on those merits. And the interesting thing is that the story of Citizens United in many ways is that it just kind of metastasizes and becomes much bigger and bigger and bigger over the course of the arguments and as it enters the Supreme Court. I would say that in some way, the door gets cracked to that actually by the FEC, which is sort of on the other side of the argument here, because during one of the arguments here, a lawyer for the FEC sort of argues that the same logic that would prevent this documentary from airing could also be applied to a book or a Kindle book. For some reason, they always talk about Kindle. It's very 2008.
Nicole Hemmer:
It's new technology. They feel [inaudible 00:30:02].
Jody Avrigan:
You could also apply this to a Kindle book or a book that is written about Hillary Clinton and it was supposed to influence an election. And it's actually that kind of reference to a book that would be published by a corporation or whatever that actually ends up being the thing that eventually Justice Kennedy and the Supreme Court kind of gloms onto and says, "Well, wait a minute, hold on. Now we're talking about something much bigger. We're not just talking about this one documentary and whether it qualifies as a campaign ad, but now we're talking about books and all sorts of other kind of larger issues."
So the FEC introduces that idea that this might be about something much bigger. It does go to the Supreme Court and initially they do vote five-four on this sort of narrow question, "Let's just let this film air."
But then there is a lot of back and forth and it gets very intricate and I'm sure campaign finance lawyers know all the details, but basically John Roberts writes this initial opinion and says, "Okay, it can air, but on this very narrow question of it's different from a 30-second ad."
But then they go back on it because Kennedy keeps bringing up this idea of the book, Kindle hypothetical. And eventually the rest of the majority comes around to Kennedy's ideas that this might be about something much bigger. And then Justice Souter writes a dissent and in his dissent, he kind of accuses Roberts of maneuvering procedure to get at this bigger idea. And then they basically, what? They scrap it, bring it back and rewrite it. And it's in the rewriting that all of a sudden they start to really engage with these larger questions of corporate speech and this huge cascade. But I don't know, Celina, correct me if I got any of that wrong, but I guess just the way that it evolved is so fascinating to me.
Celina Stewart:
Yeah. Okay. So it was initially argued in the spring, like March, and then the court ordered a re-argument literally two months later. I'm like, who got to them in two months? Let's look at the Supreme Court entry log.
Nicole Hemmer:
Wait, which corporation?
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah, I know, right?
Celina Stewart:
Who is at the court? Who visits at John Roberts? Whose house did he have dinner? Those type of things because something happened because the court had already ruled on this in March and then ordered a re-argument, which went kind of wild. Now we look at John Roberts and we can look at his trajectory and be like, "Oh my God, just have these shenanigans have these shenanigans." But that period between March 24th and June 29th is real curious to me. I'm like, something happened in that two months to change the game and have the court not only what feels like invalidate what they had already written, but to go back and now expand the scope of this to something that completely changed how campaign finance laws happened and how corporations are treated in this country and having free speech as an entity that is created. So it's pretty wild.
Nicole Hemmer:
Because the court had solved the original problem in the favor of the right wing organization. They were like, "Your film can air."
So you didn't even need the book hypothetical, even though the book hypothetical, campaign paperbacks like this have been around for ages and nothing has ever happened to them. There hasn't been an FEC ruling saying that you're unsafe at any speed against John Kerry has got to be pulped or anything. So Kennedy is getting obsessed with a problem that does not exist. And even if it existed, the ruling that they initially landed on would have covered that.
Celina Stewart:
Resolved it.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes.
Celina Stewart:
Would've resolved it.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
And a book is certainly not the same thing as a TV ad. I mean, my goodness.
Nicole Hemmer:
A book you go out and buy versus a TV ad that comes into your house.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes. You go to buy, otherwise you're sitting on your couch watching a commercial and all of a sudden it pops up and you're hearing it. Yeah.
Nicole Hemmer:
They wanted to make this ruling. I mean, this is something that we see with the court a lot these days, but when they want to rule something, they find a pretense for it and they rule it. And that's what you ultimately get with Citizens United is something that I don't think many people expected because it hadn't been argued on these terms to begin with, but this absolutely sweeping ruling that makes the argument that not only are corporations people too, but they are people with free speech rights. And those free speech rights include money, which is now speech. So some of that is building on Buckley, but they go big.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yeah. It's egregious. I mean, it is egregious to think that a corporation could have all the rights and privileges of a person.
Nicole Hemmer:
While never dying and having protections that people don't have.
Kellie Carter Jackson:
Yes. And endless amounts of capital in order to do that is just astounding to me. Astounding that you could say it with a straight face. Do you know what I mean? So here's the deal. It's crazy.
Jody Avrigan:
We should dig into the argument about corporate speech in a second, but I'm just curious, Celina, I know you weren't at the League of Women Voters at the time, but obviously this has been your world for a long time. I'm curious just people who cared about voting rights and were watching campaign finance issues, is it fair to say that they didn't realize necessarily what was at stake? I mean, I certainly think as a journalist at the time who wasn't covering this day by day and just as a citizen at the time, I think part of the experience of seeing Citizens United come down was a little bit of like, "Whoa, wait a minute. What, they decided about this? I didn't even realize the question was that big to begin with."
But on the inside, did people realize that, "Oh my gosh, this is building to this huge thing?"
Celina Stewart:
The League is a bunch of dope women who are really, really smart. So when this case first came at the lower court, before it got to the Supreme Court, we filed an amicus brief in association with the Constitutional Accountability Center that was our co-amici there. And the brief supported the FEC and urged the court to affirm or to support the district court's ruling to preserve the continued vitality of Austin v. Michigan, which was, I think it was Michigan Chamber of Commerce, that was the case. And also the McConnell versus FEC was also in play. But these cases allowed Congress to limit. And this is why it was important because we had exercising this independence between the branches, but it would've allowed Congress to limit how corporations could spend money on election related advertising and political activities. And so I think that we were in on this early as this case was matriculating through the appellate system. And then in 2010, we issued a statement saying the Supreme Court had made a tragic mistake.
The League doesn't always use that strong language, especially back then, but we said it was a tragic mistake and we called the decision constitutionally irresponsible and warning that it would produce anti-democratic revolution in campaign finance. We said it back then in 2010. And the League statement really emphasized these two core concerns that we had, which was the first that election should not be corrupted by this vast corporate wealth who just would never be in the same position as the everyday citizen, the everyday American. And that two, voters should remain at the center of the democratic system and not corporations or money. That was not what the constitution intended. And so just the case itself seemed to be one of the very early signs that the constitutional framework and the framework of the constitution were being challenged. It was like this testing of the lines. So I think that the League was on it very early, pushing back and we continued.
We have continuously supported the Disclose Act in Congress, which continues to require disclosure. Oh my God, my cat tears. What the heck is this fairy test?
Jody Avrigan:
I'm familiar with this.
Celina Stewart:
Sorry about that. But we've been supporting the Disclose Act for a while. And just recently we have vote411.org, which is our all stop, one-stop shop for voter information and stuff. You talk about our voter guides, that comes from the VOTE411 apparatus. But just over the last two years, we have added a campaign finance element to our website because we think it's really important when we can track, especially federal races, but we also have it for state races too. Who's supporting this particular candidate? What business is it? What large donor or what donor is giving large amounts of money? And that has been something that has grown. We weren't sure how popular it would be when we first added it a couple of years ago in 2022 testing it, but it was so popular. We noticed that people repeatedly went to those pages. So now we've expanded it for '26 and continuing to expand through 2028.
But people have a right to know that. And if the government's not going to force people to know it, then you can at least find out this information free on vote411.org.
Jody Avrigan:
Celina Stewart of the League of Women Voters. Okay, that is where we're going to leave it with part one of our two-part look at the Citizens United ruling. You hear Celina talk there a little bit about the efforts to help voters who are navigating the post-Citizens United political landscape. Next episode, we'll really get into what that landscape looks like, the idea of corporations having speech and rights, how the dark money started to flow after the ruling, the way the information and disinformation shape our modern politics, and a little bit more about what may come next. Thanks again to the Kettering Foundation for all their support this month. On behalf of Nicole Hemmer and Kellie Carter Jackson, my name is Jody Avrigan. We'll see you next episode for part two.
Alex Lovit:
We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to hear more, keep an eye on this day's feed later this week for part two. And in part three, Jody Avrigan and I get into the big themes. Next week we resume our regular episodes of The Context. We hope you'll tune in and we hope that folks in the Washington DC area can make it to our live podcast taping with This Day. It's on Monday, October 19th featuring special guest, the Reverend Dr. William Barber II. Check the show notes for a link to buy tickets.
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. Special thanks to Sarah Murphy for helping to coordinate this partnership. Visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts or just tell a friend about us.
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Speaker 6:
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