It?s always nice when Michael Kinsley strays from the standard illiberal line to offer words of wisdom. His latest Atlantic column fits the bill, since the target of his scrutiny is his own profession.
Kinsley faults those journalists who believe they are the only people who should benefit from real First Amendment protection:
For people whose job it is to describe the world, journalists often seem to have remarkable difficulty imagining life in other people?s shoes. Take the recent Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Reversing an earlier decision, the Court ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right of free speech, and cannot be forbidden to spend their own money expressing political views. Essentially, the decision gutted the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reforms of 2002. ?Independent expenditures? by individual citizens have been protected by the First Amendment since the Court?s Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976. But until the Citizens United case, a ban or limit on such expenditures by corporations was thought to be legal. Moderate, responsible opinion makers, including most of the nation?s leading editorial pages and probably most of its professional journalists, deplored the rulings in Buckley and Citizens United on the grounds that ?money isn?t speech.? Even President Obama spoke out against Citizens. Buckley was bad enough, freeing rich egomaniacs to spend their own money without limit in favor of some cause or candidate or their own quixotic campaigns for office. Citizens United now raises the specter of corporations flooding politics with money in pursuit of a corporate agenda of reckless deregulation, disregard for the environment, and, as always, lower taxes on capital.
These risks are real. Unfortunately, we are stuck with these few unhappy consequences of the First Amendment, just as we are stuck with the many unhappy consequences of the Second Amendment. And we should take the Constitution seriously?especially the parts we don?t like. Money is speech. The Supreme Court has always allowed limits on contributions to political campaigns, reasoning in part that the purpose of a contribution is not fundamentally to send a message. But the purpose of an independent expenditure of your own money to promote a candidate or cause is to send a message. And it?s axiomatic that the government can?t limit a message based on its content.
