The following podcast contains explicit language.

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Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for January 22nd, 2010.

I'm John Dickerson here with Emily Bazelon to my actual left, not ideologically, but physically.

David Plotz is across the table and we have a special guest appearance by Dahlia Lithwick, who is here with us. And Emily and Dahlia are going to explain the Supreme Court decision that came down on Thursday, but I'm going to throw it first to you, Dahlia, since you're our special guest. Tell us what happened. Didn't tell us what topics we were discussing today. The immediacy of the Supreme Court decision is so of the moment that I thought we'd get to this.

And because Dahlia has to leave in the middle of the – so everybody will have to hang on the edge of their seat before we get to the second topic, which will be Obama's first year.

And then the third topic, which will be the Massachusetts election, although the order might be reversed.

Dahlia, can start.

Shwa. Okay. So this was a monster day at the Supreme Court. This is a case that the court

heard last term. It was a narrow little, tiny little case when the court first got it

about a movie, an anti-Hillary Clinton movie, and whether it violated the electioneering provisions

of McCain-Feingold. And it's exploded. It's exploded into the case that people are comparing

to Bush v. Gore today. I can't say today, can I? You can say whatever you want. We compared

something to Bush v. Gore last week. So every week, we're going to have to compare everything to Bush v. Gore every week.

It exploded. Where did we compare to Bush v. Gore last week? Oh, the video.

That was also Bush v. Gore. But this is big.

Dies backing me up on that one. This is busier and gorier. This is just an enormous

overreach by the Roberts Corps doing, I think, finally what everybody

suspected they wanted to do for a long time, which is just due away with the central provision

of McCain-Feingold, and essentially to bestow upon corporations the same personhood that people,

real people with arms and legs and teeth, get under the First Amendment.

...