This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 27th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Citizens United Free Speech ruling was supposed to usher in a new era of corporate control over our elections.

Labor unions now appear to be poised to make use of the new openness afforded by the ruling.

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute Center for Representative Government, comments.

President Obama shortly after the Citizens United decision in his State of the Union address

sort of called out the Supreme Court, and it was kind of a famous

moment for, as he put it, turning back more than a half century of law. And a lot of people were complaining about the ruling and

but since then it seems that the attitudes have changed.

Well there's still a hardcore in the Democratic Party that's unhappy about it and there'll be

organizing attempts around that for constitutional amendments and so on but labor

unions had always had a sort of tendency toward liberalization, many of them, and they felt

that the rules that restricted corporations also restricted them, which was true.

So it's no great surprise I think that they're trying to figure out how to use the new environment

and indeed that was foreseen from the first that they would be.

They have a right to raise money and spend it too.

In the criticisms about Citizens United from these, I guess guess good government people who are very concerned about the

role that corporations would play in a post citizens united world unions

largely escaped being lumped in a lot of

conversation it was sort of assumed that they were there but they sort of weren't

really included in that conversation? That's correct.

You have to realize that people who are really upset about Citizens United operate within a

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