[wildgift]

The issue was who made the political speech and whether it was electioneering (promoting a candidate). Before CU, corporations, associations, and unions could not spend their money on buying ads or air time to do electioneering.

I think the point of this law was to control the effect of money on politics. If these independent expenditures (IEs) were restricted, then campaign spending would be done through the campaign.

Campaign donation limits would further decrease the influence of the wealthy and organizations on elections. Again, these limits exist specifically for this purpose.

These laws just dealt with the obvious: money has a huge influence on how much speech you have, and the only way to make speech more equal is to put restrictions on how much money you're allowed to spend on speech. The laws were limited to political speech during elections.

Furthermore, there is a distinction between personal and commercial speech and election speech, and election speech is more tightly regulated, and always has been. Our system is supposed to be one-person-one-vote, and likewise, the restrictions on speech are used to try and achieve one-person-one-voice in elections.

Citizens United was a bad decision because it extended the general personal free speech rights to election-related speech by corporations, associations, and unions.

It's led to the creation of associations that accept donations, and then produced electioneering materials and buy media as IEs.

I work for the AFL-CIO union, and the leaders at the national level happen to think that Citizens United was a bad decision, as well. They've issued statements about it.