Citizens United - Assignment Example

Citizens United What Prompted Citizen United To start with, Citizen United, a people minded NGO, presented a case to supreme court case about election spending in which Political Action Committee (PAC) was the petitioner. The source of political campaign money was a big concern for many Americans as represented by Citizens United. However, according to the documentary “Big sky, Big Money” Bopp asserts that people direct funding by influential people and corporations has been a ‘corrupting’ problem in America’s past (Neil, 2015).

However, Citizen United, a people advocate organization managed to influence the changing of the funding process. At the present, anybody can fund their favorite candidate albeit indirectly. This goes a long way in buffering corruption that may be brought by big money. This is because, the constitution does not demand for any reporting of campaign contributions and expenditures. Spending is termed as a speech, which is protected by the constitution in the First Amendment even if the speaker is a corporation.

What the Court SaidThe Supreme Court decided that everybody including large corporations. The court argued that impeding corporations from funding elections interfered with the provisions of First Amendment that guarantees freedom of speech. Despite the fact that corporations are not people per se, corporations represent groups of people, and therefore, their political support during campaigns is like support of the people. At last, the decision on the case of Citizen United was that corporate expenditures in elections did not violate the First Amendment hence politicians can use the corporate money to finance their campaigns.

Work CitedNeil Genzlinger. On Electoral Map, the Green Is Obscured ‘Big Sky, Big Money’ on PBS Frontline. Retrieved on 13 March, 2015 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/arts/television/big-sky-big-money-on-pbs-frontline.html?_r=0