LOD: Citizens United’s Origins

The New Yorker this week has an in-depth account of the manipulations and blunders that inflated a narrow issue before the US Supreme Court into the now infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. The majority opinion didn’t need to make sense – it had 5 of the 9 votes, enough to win; the dissenting views were easily more compelling. “At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in dissent. “It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” Read the article to understand the context of the opinions and significance of one or two appointments to the Supreme Court.