‘First Amendment game-changer’

What is broadly considered a major defeat for campaign finance reform may be a victory for free speech, in the contrarian analysis of the First Amendment Coalition’s Peter Scheer.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s much-lamented (including by President Obama) January ruling in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission is in fact “a First Amendment game-changer,” Scheer writes in The Huffington Post.

“The decision’s hostility to restrictions on political advocacy may have regrettable effects in the campaign finance arena (although I’m inclined to think that such concerns are overblown). Nonetheless, outside that context, Citizens United has the potential to advance First Amendment protections as significantly as the Supreme Court’s New York Times [v. Sullivan] decision nearly a half-century ago.”