This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 21st, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court handed down what has become one of the most controversial decisions in many years.

Scott Blackburn with the Institute for Free Speech details the case Citizens United V FEC

and why its opponents so substantially misunderstand the court's holding.

It was about 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago really, when you think about the

genesis of this case, this was a case about a movie

movie and I will say using my editorial

prerogative to say it wasn't a very good movie

called Hillary the movie.

The Producers of that film wanted to advertise it on television

and were prevented from doing so.

So what what happened in this case of Citizens United?

Sure. So as you say, a non-profit corporation named Citizens United wanted to run a movie called Hillary the movie,

much in the same vein that Michael Moore had previously run anti-Bush movies.

They went to the Federal Election Commission and said we're a

non-profit corporation. We want to run this movie. We want to run it close to

the election. Are we allowed to do this under campaign finance law and the Federal Election Commission said no you have to in

order to run this you have to follow a bunch of rules and you can't spend corporate money on it you can't spend your own funds on it unless it follows a bunch of

different campaign finance regulations as they existed under McCain-Feingold. This went all the way up to the Supreme Court and in 2010, I guess the, when the oral argument was held, which was the year before, The government held this position strongly. The Obama

administration said yes, this is true we can prevent them not only from running

ads for the movie but from running the movie itself on certain platforms at the time

...