On Monday of this week, former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold announced that Progressives United, the organization he runs that is dedicated to fighting the Citizens United decision, would add a 501(c)(4) entity. You may remember Senator Feingold as one of the lead sponsors of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, the bill most people know as McCain-Feingold. You may also remember that 2010’s Citizen’s United ruling overturned the provision of McCain-Feingold that made it illegal for corporations, unions or other groups to pay for issue advocacy ads during the last few months of political campaigns, when most people actually pay attention to issues.
One of the more ironic aspects of this is that one of the key talking points of the so-called campaign finance ‘reform’ community was that corporations aren’t literally capable of speaking, so it was absurd to give an artificial entity the same First Amendment rights as living, breathing human beings. Many a ‘reformer’ mocked the idea of corporate speech by rhetorically asking where the corporation’s larynx, mouth, or tongue were.
I don’t recall offhand whether Senator Feingold was among those providing analysis of the anatomical details of corporations, but it would seem that his decision to form a 501(c)4 corporation to speak out on this issue should settle once and for all the question of whether or not a corporation CAN speak (leaving in dispute the question of whether it’s a good idea for them to do so, of course).
Now that Feingold has joined the side that’s comfortable with the concept of corporations “speaking” politically (presumably he accepts that an actual mouth is not required), he promises to “practice what he preaches by setting up strict disclosure requirements and contribution limits for his group.” One wonders why these efforts by other organizations were not good enough for him before.
