This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Citizens United case affirmed that a speaker's identity or corporate form has nothing to say about whether the relevant

speech is protected under the First Amendment. But there's another right under the

First Amendment that's related to free speech that's free association. SpeechNow.org a group of people that may be headed to the

Supreme Court want to let free speakers associate freely as well. Steve Simpson,

senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, represents SpeechNow.org.

One of the things about Citizens United that nobody wants to pay attention to now,

that big corporations apparently will be able to spend money on elections is that Citizens United was about banning films.

That's what was at the heart of this case.

A conservative group created a film about Hillary Clinton.

They wanted to distribute it to people,

and the FEC basically said you're not allowed to do that.

During the oral argument,

I think it was Justice Alito asked a question, well if they can ban films,

can't they ban books as well? I mean books are paid for with corporate money and the answer from the government was stunningly yes.

And that's a fact that has been downplayed by all of

the people that are claiming this means the end of the world and and Justice

Kennedy's decision in Citizens United actually made that clear. The government's response to all that

was, well yeah, books come in within certain provisions of this law and certainly if a corporation

published a book that said vote for Obama or against Obama that would be covered

as an independent expenditure.

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