The big legal news today is that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the courts cannot ban large corporations from engaging in political advocacy. What this means, as I understand it, is that there’s no stopping a big corporation from spending a lot of money or producing a lot of ads for a presidential candidate or against a presidential candidate. SCOTUS’s reasoning is that it would be an infringement on free speech to outlaw such acts.

I think this is the exact wrong way of looking at it. Barring corporations from engaging in political advocacy doesn’t stop the individual members from doing so, it just stops an entity with a potentially weak moral code and lots of money from dramatically swaying a political race. Justice Stevens said it well:

Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.

Stevens’ dissenting opinion is appropriately honest. What the ruling really does is allow big corporations to go unchecked in politics

–Daniel Strauss