Wall Street Journal: The Incumbent’s Bane: Citizens United and the 2010 Election
By Bradley A. Smith
Last Jan. 27, President Obama stunned his State of the Union audience with an unprecedented attack on the Supreme Court and its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The president claimed that the Jan. 21, 2010, decision would allow “special interests—including foreign companies—to spend without limit in our elections.” In other speeches, the president argued that Citizens United would create “a stampede of special-interest money in our politics,” “drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” and “strike at our democracy itself.”
The president’s criticism was comparatively sedate. Then-Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) called it “the worst decision since Dred Scott,” the 1857 decision that held that no descendent of a slave could claim U.S. citizenship. Even the Supreme Court’s dissenting liberals claimed it would “undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”
The president’s remarks were not only factually inaccurate—the decision did not allow foreign companies to spend in U.S. elections—but none of the doomsday predictions has come true. Thanks in significant part to the decision, the 2010 elections were the most competitive and issue-oriented in a generation.
Citizens United empowered corporations and unions to make independent expenditures in elections. Predictably, this led to a modest increase in political spending in 2010. More importantly, it opened up the political system to challengers and allowed new issues to come to the fore.
