What Glenn Greenwald Got Wrong about the Constitution

[NJmaverick]

by Doug Kendall, President & Founder, and Hannah McCrea, Online Communications Director, of Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC)

Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald has been urging calm among progressives who are appalled and angry at the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Citizens United v. FEC, and accusing progressive critics of the ruling of over-simplifying the law and under-respecting the First Amendment. But his own analysis is surprisingly shallow and his burden is pretty high when he is essentially saying that Justice Stevens’ brilliant and comprehensive 90 page dissent, joined in full by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, gets the Constitution wrong, and the five conservatives on the Roberts Court got this one right. He doesn’t come close to making that argument stick.

SNIP

Greenwald’s main beef with progressive critics of the ruling is that we are fighting issues such as “money is speech” and “corporate personhood,” which are not really front and center in the case. To Greenwald – as to the majority – Citizens United is simply about the First Amendment and nothing else. Greenwald writes:

I tend to take a more absolutist view of the First Amendment than many people, but laws which prohibit organized groups of people — which is what corporations are — from expressing political views goes right to the heart of free speech guarantees no matter how the First Amendment is understood. Does anyone doubt that the facts that gave rise to this case — namely, the government’s banning the release of a critical film about Hillary Clinton by Citizens United — is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to avoid? And does anyone doubt that the First Amendment bars the government from restricting the speech of organizations composed of like-minded citizens who band together in corporate form to work for a particular cause?

Whether one calls this an “absolutist” view or just an “overly simplistic” one is, perhaps, a matter of semantics, but Greenwald is missing the point. Yes, individuals should have the right to form and express political views, whether as a voting bloc, an alliance of protestors, or a legally-recognized entity that collects individual donations to advance a political message. If the Court had written a narrow opinion vindicating the speech of such groups, it is likely that we would have seen a unanimous opinion. After all, at oral argument, Justice Stevens himself argued for precisely this result.

http://theusconstitution.org/blog.history/?p=1511