In rendering their decision, the majority in Citizens United v. FEC swept away decades of concerns expressed regarding corporate influence on US elections. From Brandeis to Rhenquist to Marshall, justices have consistently, and at times unanimously, ruled that the interests of the public in maintaining fair and open elections extended to limiting corporate campaign expenditures. It cannot be stressed enough how complete a reversal this ruling represents.

Corporations may now spend freely on elections. Not only were the strictures of McCain-Feingold lifted, no new legislation attempting to implement any similar ordnance is likely to survive any court challenge. The only corrective measure that could possibly return corporations to their status as instruments of law and not as legal persons would be a constitutional amendment, and the odds of such an amendment passing with the necessary three-quarters of the states ratifying it are remote.

The consequences of this ruling on federal elections are cause for concern. However, it is the effect on the Supreme Court's modus operandi that is equally chilling. In 1936, Justice Brandeis stressed the importance of following the rules the Court had developed for its own governance, noting that making rulings on broad constitutional theories rather than narrow statutory grounds would create greater risk for error. Few rulings have been as broad as the majority's ruling in Citizens United. For example, in 1986, Sandra Day O'Connor ruled with the majority upholding the anti-sodomy statutes in Bowers v Hardwick, which was subsequently overturned by Lawrence v Texas, in which O'Connor also concurred. This might appear as "flip-flopping". However, as O'Connor noted in her concurring decision in Lawrence, the question in Bowers was one of due process while the question in Lawrence was one of equal protection. O'Connor, despite identifying the legal and moral problem with Bowers knew her hands were tied by how the Supreme Court limited its rulings. She was only able to correct the injustice 17 years later.

The majority did not just change 100 years of legal precedent, but also upset 220 years of Court precedent by choosing to move beyond the complaint filed by Citizens United and consider the First Amendment implications of the entire statute. This established a precedent for future courts to make dramatic rulings that even alters the balance of powers. Whereas before the Court could only go so far in contradicting the legislation passed by our elected members of congress and signed by our elected president. In effect, the Court has taken the power to trump the will of the people in toto.

The only bright spot in this ruling is that eight members of the court concurred on the issue of transparency. Congress may require ads disclose who is paying for them, and those regulations enforcing transparency might mitigate their influence. Senator Schumer and Congressman Van Hollen have started drafting legislation to those ends, and supporting that legislation is the most important thing we can do until a future court can find some way of overturning Citizens United.

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