This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 24th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The establishment media seems not to understand what overturning citizens United might mean for their own ability to endorse candidates

or otherwise talk about politics in influential ways.

Don McGann is vice chair of the Federal Election Commission.

He describes what the case said said and what its opponents might not

understand.

I think Citizens United Speech now in other cases, other recent cases. You can argue it's changed nothing or it's changed everything. The biggest

change is the legal underpinnings of much of the current law

had been stripped away, meaning much of the current law was based much more on an equal speech,

leveling the playing field, kind approached Supreme Court again, but really unequivocally

rejected that rationale for the law and Citizens United.

In the short term, it allows people who are otherwise banned from speaking, from speaking,

meaning corporate entities, particularly smaller corporate entities, like Citizens United was a non-profit.

It made a movie, government tried to ban the movie.

So that's no longer can be banned.

It also limits the power of government bureaucrats to regulate in that area.

The other thing really striking about citizen opinion was how the

Supreme Court took the FEC to task for its antics over the years. I mean it

actually went so far to say the FEC's business is a censor.

Wasn't a good day for a federal agency. For years the FEC had continued to try to revisit prior case laws like Buckley and really try to regulate speech in a way

of the court previously said not to do, and yet it kept trying to do that.

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