This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 9, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown. You can speak freely and associate freely when it comes to campaign spending or activity, but you can't always do both.

Paul Sherman, a staff attorney at the Institute for Justice, says what the left hated about

the Citizens United decision, letting corporations speak more freely, it should love about the recent ruling in

DC on speech now dot org namely that people bound only by a common interest have the same

rights we spoke last week.

Citizens United is an absolutely landmark First Amendment decision.

And basically what it represents is the ultimate rejection of the so-called equality rationale for regulating

political speech.

What the Supreme Court held is that you can't silence speakers just because you think they are going to be

influential. In Citizens United they held that that applies to corporations and

unions. In Speech Now the DC Circuit held that that applies to unincorporated groups of citizens

who get together to speak about elections.

The criticism from the left, and I go back to this several times because it was the first time

I ever saw Keith Oberman's program it was the first time I ever saw Keith

Oberman's program was the day that that decision was handed down.

He compared it to Dread Scott.

He suggested that it was a this is it was our Dreadot for our time.

And I was actually very surprised

that there was such a visceral reaction on the left

to this particular decision. it was wrapped up in the idea of corporations being

people or having essentially the same rights as people when it comes to speaking. What does the Speech Now case do for the

left in terms of, if not correcting what they see as a problem, at least potentially mitigating it.

...