So Corp Law required modification before CU? Corporations were really struggling before that ruling weren't they. The ruling resulted in Corporations having the same 1st Amendment rights as citizens. Further the argument that many Media organizations were corporations was used as a justification when in fact a free press is assured in the Constitution. In other words, the fact that some Media organizations are corporations simply is a meaningless argument.
Corporations were designed to offer more protections than a citizen has with regard to civil tort especially. Corporations are inherently different from citizens though a corporation can in fact be a single citizen. Corporations do not have an inherent 1st Amendment right and it should be plainly obvious that corporations and citizens are not the same things in any respect. The Press and Corporations are not the same thing though it is plainly obvious that some media outlets are corporations.
Had corporations not been fashioned as a shield offering specific additional protections that a citizen does not have, and a vehicle for conducting business more efficiently than a citizen then the SC would have a point. But that is not the case. To have devised a vehicle to protect citizens and facilitate business, the Corporation, and then go back and claim the rights of a citizen for a Corporation is flat silly.
The SC lost itself in its own deliberations, overthought CU and ultimately lost track of the forest for the trees.
This is an inaccurate understanding of both corporate personhood, and the Citizen's United decision. Corporations have always had First Amendment rights.
The crux of the CU decision was about what limits can be placed on that speech.
To understand CU in context, you have to look at prior campaign finance rulings. The first significant ruling was
Buckley v. Valeo, in 1976. In Buckey, the court determined that donating money to a political campaign was an expression of speech, and in order for campaign finance laws to be applied, they must be examined under strict scrutiny - that any restrictions on speech must serve an important state purpose, and must be narrowly tailored to minimize the restrictions of speech.
Under that standard, the Court upheld limits on donations to campaigns, under the argument that unlimited donations could lead to real or apparent corruption. On the other hand, they overturned restrictions on how much campaigns could spend, because there was no legitimate state purpose behind them.
There were a lot of other cases in between, but the framework of Buckley is the same framework the Court used in CU - it wasn't a matter of whether corporations have first Amendment rights, it's about whether the restrictions on corporate spending could survive strict scrutiny.
In ruling that corporate expenditures on campaigns could not survive strict scrutiny, the Court redefined "real or apparent corruption" - the standard in Buckley - to include only direct
quid pro quo corruption. Through that lense, they ruled that corporate expenditures in politics (as long as the money is not given to the candidate, but spent independently) could not lead to a direct quid pro quo, and therefore the restrictions were violations of the first amendment.
