(p 280)
On January 21, 2010, the Court announced its 5-4 decision in the Citizens United case, overturning a century of restrictions banning corporations and unions from spending all they wanted to elect candidates...To reach the verdict, the Court accepted the argument that corporations had the same rights to free speech as citizens...
...the courts embraced the argument that independent spending, as opposed to direct contributions to the candidates, wouldn't result in corruption. From the start, critics like Richard Posner, a brilliant and iconoclastic conservative federal judge, declared the Court had reasoned "naively," pointing out that it was "difficult to see what practical difference there is between super PAC donations and direct campaign donations, from a corruption standpoint."
As [one writer] summarized it, was that "it gave rich people more or less free rein to spend as much as they want in support of their favored candidates."
(p 281)
...As a result, the American political system became awash in unlimited, untraceable cash.
In striking down the existing campaign-finance laws, the courts eviscerated a century of reform. [Including the Tillman Act of 1907]
(p 282)
By overturning many of these restrictions, the Citizens United decision was in many respects a return to the Gilded Age.
Justice John Paul Stevens, a moderate Republican when first appointed but long part of the court's liberal wing, described the decision as "a radical departure from what has been settled First Amendment law." In a lengthy dissent [90 pages!], he argued that the Constitution's framers had enshrined the right of free speech for "individual Americans, not corporations," and that to act otherwise was "a rejection of the common sense of the American people who have recognized the need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt." Memorably, Stevens added, "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."