Justice Thomas' Remarks
Return to Citizen United v. Federal Election Commission
http://www.wusf.usf.edu/player/Player.php?itemurl=http://www.wusf.usf.edu/pbcore/7161/full_audio.xml
His comments copied below start at 53 minutes in.
Audience member: President Obama said quote: “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.” It was widely publicized that Justice Alito mouthed “not true.” I just wanted to know if you would like to expand upon that at all.
Justice Thomas: Not really. [laughter] You know, first of all remember that most of the regulation of corporations started with the Tillman Act. Go back and read why Tillman introduced that legislation to regulate corporations. Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them. So, we don’t raise that to this plane of, some sort of beatific action.
But that aside, I have taken the position that the court adopted with respect to how we associate: If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association. If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association. Well what if you put yourself in a corporate form? I found it fascinating that the people who were editorializing against it were the New York Times Company and the Washington Post Company, who were exempted by statute, so then it becomes a statutory right, not a Constitutional right. These are corporations, The Gannett Company, you see what I am saying? What does the form that we associate in have to do with a right?
But anyways, the opinions speak for themselves. I’ve written extensively, you go back and you [read] the Shrink case in Missouri, Colorado Republican Party, McCain Feingold, the big campaign finance cases. I’ve dissented, excuse me, either dissented or concurred in all those cases saying that this distinction was absurd. I found it interesting that the ACLU agreed, I think, with the outcome in this case, and you would not consider them conservative, you see? A corporation is a corporation, and a corporation can be 10 people, it can be a subchapter S corporation, there are all sorts of ways that we decide to associate and to speak. But I’m not going to reargue that, people have their own opinion, my job is not to argue about their opinion, it is to write opinions and to decide cases, and then they can react any way they want to.
