This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 9th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown. The Supreme Court in a rare move will rehear the case Citizens United VFEC. That case just might overturn much of

current campaign finance law restricting more direct corporate involvement in elections.

Bradley Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission,

and founder of the Center for Competitive Politics, says

more direct corporate involvement in elections is just fine with him.

I think at oral argument in March they realized that this case involves some very big

principles.

It would be possible perhaps to decide this case

on narrow grounds, but the government's position relies on these cases Austin and

McConnell and the government's position is that those cases give them the

constitutional authority to ban books if

need be and I think when the court heard that they said maybe we'd better rethink

those precedents. When Malcolm Stewart the deputy solicitor general, said, well, yes, Justice Kennedy, when you download

a book on your Kindle, that is a broadcast community, that is a satellite communication,

and yes, I suppose, between 30, 60 days of an election we actually could

ban that was that bad lawyer in on his part? No I think in fact that is exactly

what the government had put in its briefs and you can't really run away from your briefs.

Now it's possible that another lawyer might have said, oh well we didn't really mean that.

But doing that would have essentially thrown away the government's case in the immediate action.

It might have preserved Austin, but the solicitor can't just abandon his client in the middle of oral argument.

That was the FEC's position and so I'm not

...