Кой може да финансира политическото слово по време на предизборна кампания е въпрос, свързан и със свободата на словото.
Върховният съд на САЩ се произнася (5:4) по делото Citizens United v. Federal Election Сommission, че правителството не може да ограничава политическото слово по време на предизборна кампания.
Анализ в Ню Йорк Таймс (проф. Стенли Фиш) “За какво е Първата поправка”. Очертават се двете тези: регламентирането на финансирането ограничава политическото слово/ липсата на ограничения деформира (корумпира) политическите дебати, защото големият бизнес получава предимства (в този смисъл е реакцията на президента Обама: петролът и банките печелят).
Съдия Кенеди за мнозинството, съдия Стивънс за малцинството
Зарежете мненията на Кенеди, вижте това на Скалия и как готино се подиграва с глупостите на либералите.
Това е забавно:
fn. 7. The dissent says that “ ‘speech’ ” refers to oral communications of human beings, and since corporations are not human beings they cannot speak. Post, at 37, n. 55. This is sophistry. The authorized spokesman of a corporation is a human being, who speaks on behalf ofthe human beings who have formed that association—just as the spokesman of an unincorporated association speaks on behalf of itsmembers. The power to publish thoughts, no less than the power to speak thoughts, belongs only to human beings, but the dissent sees noproblem with a corporation’s enjoying the freedom of the press. The same footnote asserts that “it has been ‘claimed that the notion of institutional speech . . . did not exist in post-revolutionary America.’ ” This is quoted from a law-review article by a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago (Fagundes, State Actors as First AmendmentSpeakers, 100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1637, 1654 (2006)), which offers as thesole support for its statement a treatise dealing with governmentspeech, M. Yudof, When Government Speaks 42–50 (1983). The cited pages of that treatise provide no support whatever for the statement—unless, as seems overwhelmingly likely, the “institutional speech” referred to was speech by the subject of the law-review article, govern-mental institutions. The other authority cited in the footnote, a law-review article by a professor at Washington and Lee Law School, Bezanson, Institutional Speech, 80 Iowa L. Rev. 735, 775 (1995), in fact contradicts the dissent, in that it would accord free-speech protection to associations.