This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 13th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Speech emanating from corporations on political issues of the day

may be less controversial than it was a decade ago,

thanks in part to a strong defense of

speech rights and courts. Yet there's a growing movement on the right to use

government to punish corporations for daring to have opinions on legislative

matters.

Paul Matzko is a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

We talked about the right's departure from defending robust speech last week.

We've seen quite a shift on the right on a number of issues. One of those is so-called big tech.

You know, if we go back a few more years trade has been a pretty substantial shift on the right

you write for the dispatch about the shift on speech, on the ability of companies to have

partisan commitments or ideological commitments that the right doesn't care for.

Yeah, I mean we in 2010 you could argue that the conservative movement reached a high water mark when it came to corporate property rights

Something that we hadn't seen for a century since the early 20th century the idea that corporations are allowed to spend

their money on political advertising in support of campaigns especially

independent political advertising.

And in the Citizens United versus FEC case,

where an organization that basically funnels money from corporations, challenged an FEC campaign finance

requirement that said that corporations couldn't do that.

When all the Supreme Court, Supreme Court said, no, corporations have these kinds of First Amendment rights

...