Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010)

procons.json

{
    "case":"Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission",
    "year": 2010,
    "holding": "Political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. While corporations or unions may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast.",
    "judgement": "Reversed",
    "decision": "Corporations cannot be restrict independent expenditures from corporations to campaigns",
    "pros(of overturning restrictions)": {
        "1": "Denying freedom of speech rights to corporations puts at risk other First Amendment protected speech, such as political books published by corporations",
        "2": {
            "argument": "Corporations are an association of individuals (shareholders) with a right to defend their interests",
            "refutation": "Shareholders may not always agree, and even when they do, that doesn't mean they'll still support the candidate that the corporation is supporting. Also, the majority of shareholders aren't consulted on their opinions on each candidate the corporation wants to back"
        },
        "3": "Shareholders are smart enough to keep track of how much corporations are spending on politics and where they are spending it",
        "4": "Laws designed to control money in politics often bleed over into censorship and violate the First Amendment",
        "5": "The exemption for political spending in the media was unfair -- by producing a newspaper, a corporation retained its First Amendment rights, but another corporation with similar views but no newspaper lost its First Amendment rights.",
        "6": null
    },
    "cons(of overturning restrictions)": {
        "1": "Overturning gives corporations the right to spend shareholder money on campaign advertisements advancing their own political agenda, without necessarily having their shareholder's knowledge or consents",
        "2": "Having a restriction forcing corporations to donate to PACs instead of directly to campaigns protects dissenting shareholders of business corporations",
        "3": "Almost any kind of business spending on politics creates an appearance of corruption, if not actually creating corruption. The reason for this is that corporations have huge enough sums of mooney to force politicians to do what they want, or face the political concequences.",
        "4": "Some nonprofit ideological groups are incorporated. Most are small enough that setting up PACs would be a big burden and a hassle. ALso, many potential donors to these groups don't want to be publicly listed as having donated to specific causes.",
        "5": "Corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money. They are given special privileges to enable them to do that, such as in the tax code. To treat them as indivviduals politically doesn't make sense. ",
        "6": null
    }
}