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The court took it upon itself to write a much broader opinion than was necessary to decide the case, and it's this opinion that the people object to. I don't care to defend the FEC's original position, but I don't think it's as obviously wrong as you suggest -- the movie was allegedly long-form campaign ad, and that is a fact that could be tried by a jury if needed.
You ask:
This is exactly the type of thing that the decision prevents. In fact, the kickstarter would have been strongly protected already as private speech. Corporations, as creatures of the state, should be able to have their speech limited by the state, which was the law prior to CU v. FEC.
They're 'creature of the state' but uh, they also do not exist independently of the people that invoke the state's rules to create them.
The fundamental question is how you can recognize individuals' rights to free speech, including the right to spend money on political messaging, and yet NOT recognize that a group of individuals organizing as a corporation and pooling their funds to spend on political messaging are just invoking the exact same right they each individually possess.
I mean, sure, you could say that the state is entitled to define the rules under which corporations operate at all, but they can still avoid running roughshod over the 'fundamental rights' that citizens are supposed to posses irrespective of the state's position on them.
Extending your logic to its furthest reaches would also enable an end run around other constitutional rights. The Second Amendment says people can keep and bear arms, but if people want to form a company to manufacture and sell firearms, they can get shut down unilaterally? The Fourth Amendment protects people against unreasonable searches, but why should internal corporate communications have such protection? Nevermind that it is people who are 'exercising' the rights in either case, if a corporation can be punished or shut down for performing actions that would be constitutionally protected if an individual performed them, then there's an argument that a corporation can escape that punishment by simply paying some separate individual to do it for them.
"Oh, so corporations aren't allowed to spend money on political campaigns? Okay. Well we just sent 1 million dollars over to Bob, and Bob just happened to spend it all on a given candidate in a given race. Are you saying Bob doesn't have freedom of speech?"
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Does this apply to media corporations? Or do I have to be the sole owner of a newspaper to have speech rights and if I incorporate I give them up to the state?
And if a megacorp like Amazon (or technically Jeff Bezos) buys a newspaper, does that newspaper suddenly lose its speech rights?
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Yes, to retain the spirit of freedom of speech there needs to be some sort of balancing. As you suggest, giving full government control to corporate speech seems wrong, but so does treating, say, Exxon-Mobil as if they were a biological citizen in that regard. I don't think the law is written here -- at the time of founding corporations were rare and presumably the framers would likely have little issue with restricting their rights. In that case history and tradition reasoning sends the issue to the legislature, though other types of interpretation leave roles for the courts.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
Those words mean something to some of us...
Something indeed, and apparently something different to you than what they meant to the people who wrote them.
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