Notice that under the law struck down in Citizens United, different classes of speakers are treated differently with respect to the right to engage in political speech shortly before elections:
1. Bill Gates could spend billions to produce an anti-Trump film--Bad Orange Man--and make it available on demand for free
2. The New York Times could use corporate funds to produce an anti-Trump film--Mean Tweet Man--and make it available on its corporate web site for free
3. But if Hobby Lobby wanted to use its corporate funds to subsidize an anti-Harris film--Kamradalla--and make it available on demand, it commits a felony
This kind of discrimination against different classes of speakers (individuals, media corporations, and non-media corporations) is difficult to justify under the Free Speech Clause. It is particularly difficult to defend two classes of corporations--media corporations (including for-profit media corporations that are often owned by non-media conglomerate corporations or by billionaires like Jeff Bezos) and "non-media" corporations which wish to fund speech that a media corporation would be free to do.
If we are going to ban corporate political speech during election seasons, let's not discriminate between media corporations and non-media corporations. Let's ban them all, or ban none. 60 Days without any political news! Thoughts?
No comments:
Post a Comment