What Citizens United Actually Changed About Political Speech

Think you know Citizens United? The headlines got the heat, but the holding was far narrower than the myth. We walk through the real story—what the Court protected, what it left alone, and why the biggest shift in campaign money came from a different case altogether.

We start with the foundation set by Buckley v. Valeo, where the Court split campaign finance into two buckets: contributions to candidates, which can be limited to deter corruption, and independent expenditures, which are protected political speech. From there, we explain how McCain–Feingold tried to fence off the final days before elections by forcing certain speakers—non-media corporations—to route messages through PACs, all while keeping disclosure rules in place. That’s the backdrop for Citizens United, a case about a group wanting to release a film critical of a presidential candidate near an election. The majority framed that as core political speech and rejected a law that singled out specific speakers during the most crucial window for voters.

Here’s the twist: the ruling did not grant corporations unlimited power to bankroll candidates or say that “money is speech.” Coordination still turns spending into a restricted contribution, and contribution caps remain intact for direct support. The real engine of super PAC dominance was SpeechNow.org v. FEC, a lower court decision that treated donations to independent-expenditure-only committees as uncapped. That interpretation, left unchallenged, opened the floodgates for unlimited money just outside campaign walls while preserving the legal fiction of “no coordination.”

Along the way, we explore disclosure, the media exemption, Justice Stevens’s time-place-manner argument, and Justice Thomas’s concerns about chilling speech. We also dig into how super PACs operate in practice, why transparency matters for voter trust, and where smart reforms could land—tightening coordination definitions, stress-testing contribution limits to outside groups, and strengthening real-time disclosures. If you’ve wondered why elections feel louder and pricier than ever, and where the law drew—and blurred—the lines, this breakdown gives you the map.

If this helped clarify the difference between Citizens United and SpeechNow, follow the show, share with a friend who loves politics, and leave a quick review to tell us what case we should tackle next.

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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Citizens United
• 1:10 Buckley v. Valeo: The Baseline
• 2:27 McCain–Feingold And Disclosure Rules
• 3:49 Majority vs. Dissent: Core Political Speech
• 4:55 What Citizens United Does And Doesn’t Do
• 6:05 Independent Expenditures vs. Contributions
• 7:09 Enter SpeechNow: Birth Of Super PACs
• 8:41 Why Anger Targets The Wrong Case
• 10:22 Closing Clarifications And Sign-Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:33

Welcome back to Civics in Year. I'm really excited about this one because today we get to talk about Citizens United versus the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission. We have Dr. Beinberg with us today. Dr. Bienberg, when I hear Citizens United, all I can think about is corporations have free speech. Can you give us a little bit more on this case?

SPEAKER_01: 1:58

Yes, I would. And this is one of the cases that I laugh to my students. My goal is to make con law boring. And this is one of the ones where for folks like you and me, when we this came down and shortly thereafterward, everybody was howling because they said Citizen United says X. And it actually doesn't say X. I'm going to make so uh so you can see that it's boring and in some ways much narrower than its popular uh thing. To do that, I'm gonna back up just a little bit to the last case called Buckley V Valio, that it's a precedent of. Buckley V Valio was a sort of the one of the early major federal election rules cases. And in that case, they effectively said that contributions by corporations and but the contributions could be limited to politics to basically a political campaign. So if I'm running for office, you can only give me a certain amount of money because you want to avoid basically corruption concerns. So the Buckley V Valio case says independent expenditures of a group basically wanting to run an ad saying vote for or against Liz Evans, that's fine. But whether, whether like how much money I as Sean Beinberg could give to Liz Evans, that can be restricted. And the court says effectively, money is not directly speech. If you want to run an ad saying vote for Liz Evans, that's directly speech. But just me writing you a check doesn't count as speech. So that's the sort of the backstory case. And I say that because Citizens United, I think, effectively follows that framework. So the rule, the McCain Feingold campaign finance law that gets passed, interestingly, over a very odd signing statement by George W. Bush, where he says, I think this is probably unconstitutional, but it's above my pay grade. I'll let the Supreme Court fix it. Which the presidents no longer taking constitutionalism as sort of their obligation and punting it to the courts has been a problem that's sort of evolved. It's an easy case to pick on, but it's been a sort of evolving problem over the last however many decades. But the Supreme Court, so the McCain Feingold Act, the relevant parts for our purposes, is that it says uh non-media corporations that are engaging in political speech within, and there's a couple different days sort of framework, 60 days, 30 days, whatever, but within basically a fixed period of an election, have to do it through a political action committee and it has to be organized in various ways. And so it effectively says non-media corporations, if they're running advertisements, if they're releasing material, it has to go through this really, really convoluted PAC system. And they also have to maintain disclosure laws. So, like if you're giving, if that PAC is, you know, who's giving the money or whatever. And the Supreme Court says, again, consistent with Buckley Vivalio and over the protests of Clarence Thomas, who says disclosure requirements were effectively used to destroy the NAACP, try to destroy the NAACP in the 1950s. So Thomas wants to say the disclosure requirements are unconstitutional. But consistent with that 70s case, the court says disclosure requirements are fine. But the main thing is that the court says independent expenditures are constitutionally protected speech. That if a group of people organized as a corporation want to run an ad saying Liz Evans is great, that they have a free speech right to do it, and it is at the core of the First Amendment, commenting directly on political issues and political speech. The dissent, Justice Stevens, wants to argue this is a time, manner, and place restriction, which is we've talked about before. We did the First Amendment stuff. That's fine as long as it's neutrally administered. So Stevens wants to say, look, these corporations can still run advertisement, you can still run the speech, you just have to organize it into a particular manner. Justice Kennedy, for the majority, rejects that position because he says it doesn't say nobody can run ads within 60 days, or everybody can run. It doesn't, or all speakers, or even all corporations, right? Because it has that media exemption in it. Kennedy argues that the McCain-Feingold rule says for a particular subset of speakers, we will impose additional burdens for them to, again, at their core, the Citizens United case is about a group that wants to release materials critical of Hillary Clinton before an election, right? Which I think everybody would agree that criticizing a presidential candidate for an election is core political speech. But the dissent wants to say the way this is drawn up is a time, manner, and place restriction. The majority wants to say no. Stopping a group of people from criticizing or praising a political candidate before an election is the absolute core of First Amendment political speech. So the Citizens United case, importantly, doesn't say that money is speech. It doesn't set a rule for a campaign contribution to either an individual or a PAC. It doesn't touch any of that. So it's much narrower than people said, oh, corporations, corporations are people and they can spend what like that rule is a much older rule, but the corporations can do whatever they want with their money is not from the Citizens United case. It's much narrower. Can a group of people spend money on, again, and it has to be them themselves. If they spend, if they give money for Liz Evans to say how great Liz Evans is, again, Citizens United doesn't touch that. Buckley V. Valio said that was fine. So Citizens United really is about a group of people organized as a corporation. And Citizens United is not a is not Pfizer. It's not Walmart, right? Corporate people are organized as corporations, churches organize as corporations, right? All kinds of groups organize as corporations. So it sort of gets pitched as this means like Pfizer is going to suddenly drop a bunch of money in Liz Evans' campaign. It doesn't say that at all. It says that groups of people can basically organize to criticize or praise, you're going to keep going with you as your future political persona, Liz, but they can criticize you. The interesting part and the thing that I think people get most upset about is not Citizens United, but it actually comes in a later case, which we can talk about uh in a second.

SPEAKER_00: 8:41

So what are the like quick implications of the Citizens United decision on elections? Because, you know, when we talked about this, when I taught APGov, you know, we talked about the rise of super PACs, you know, all of these different things. Did it fundamentally change how freedom of speech is protected through the election cycle? Or, you know, you're talking about you want to make it boring, was it really just corporations with which are made of people have free speech?

SPEAKER_01: 9:19

Yeah, I think it's closer to that, that corporations, groups, or corporations have free speech to specifically and again independently run advertisements pro or against Liz Evans. Because if, say, you know, the Pfizer corporation says, Liz, we really like you, and we want to run an ad on your behalf saying how wonderful you are. If they talk to you under federal election law, that is not an independent expenditure, that's a campaign contribution.

unknown: 9:50

Right?

SPEAKER_01: 9:50

If you say, It, I, you know, I'm really hurting in Utah. It'll be really great if you could run ads in Utah for me. And so then they run a bunch of ads, pay for a bunch of ads. Under federal election law, that if the FEC would treat that as a campaign contribution, which is restricted and Citizens United doesn't touch that. Okay. So the implications of Citizens United itself are relatively limited, which is you can basically organize as a group of people and run ads, praising or criticizing a candidate before an election. The controversial part, you alluded to the rise of super PACs, isn't Citizens United. It's a lower court case that comes down a few months later called Speech Now versus FEC, which has a really interesting alignment of just the judges on it. Both Merrick Garland and Brett Kavnau, for example, are on that opinion. And for I could rattle off other sort of interesting alignments. The SpeechNow case says, and they heard oral arguments before Citizens United came down. So it's interesting that sort of it gets decided very quickly as a sort of and Citizens United says this. I'm actually not convinced that it does because what Speech Now versus FEC says is contributions to an outside group like a super PAC, those can't be restricted. That only contributions directly to Liz Evans can be restricted. But contributions to the friends at ASU of Liz Evans PAC, that's unrestricted. And to my mind, it's not clear that that's even the most natural reading of Citizens United. The lower court thought it was. I don't think that's consistent with Buckley B. Vallio. Interestingly, when that case came from the circuit courts, Attorney General Eric Holder thought the case wasn't interesting and wasn't worth appealing to the Supreme Court to indeed get clarification. Does Citizens United require this or not? He thought that it would not matter. It turns out he was very mistaken on that because that case then led to the massive, massive increase of contributions to super PACs, which are effectively financially unlimited. There's been an effort actually in Maine in 2024. I think it was 24, it might have been 22. They passed a law which tries to restrict contributions to PACs in Maine in order to generate a test case to basically sort of try to fix Eric Holder's thing where he's like, this isn't important. And so what I tell people is you may have very good reason to be mad about the role of money in politics, but you should be mad at the Speech Now case. The Citizens United case is in fact much more technical and narrow than it is. So SpeechNow is, again, for folks that are maybe maybe you think that it's totally fine to have that kind of a contribution, but Speech Now is what does it. Citizens United does not challenge the old framework that the amount of dollar contributions can be restricted. It just simply says if you want to basically run an ad saying you like or dislike a candidate, you should be able to do that. Just because you're a corporation doesn't mean that you sort of lose downright.

SPEAKER_00: 13:11

Dr. Beinberg, thank you. I will let everybody know I have no intention on running for office. So anything said in here does not need to comply with the Federal Election Commission because there is no election of Liz Evans. I'm very happy here at ASU. Thank you, Dr. Beinberg.