CMV: Citizens United Was Correctly Decided

Read the comments of any political thread on reddit, it's inevitable that a highly upvoted post will blame a problem on citizens united. But I'm not sure most people have even read the decision. A quick case summary is a group wanted to make a documentary about Hillary Clinton. There were laws that close to the election there was a cap on how much you can spend. Citizens United sued and said that preventing them from making a documentary, even though the law was about money, was a violation of their first amendment rights. The Supreme Court agreed.

1. The ACLU, not a group you'd confuse for pro big business or money in politics, agrees with the ruling. Here's what they had to say:

"Any rule that requires the government to determine what political speech is legitimate and how much political speech is appropriate is difficult to reconcile with the First Amendment. Our system of free expression is built on the premise that the people get to decide what speech they want to hear; it is not the role of the government to make that decision for them.

It is also useful to remember that the mixture of money and politics long predates Citizens United and would not disappear even if Citizens United were overruled. The 2008 presidential election, which took place before Citizens United,was the most expensive in U.S. history until that point. The super PACs that have emerged in the 2012 election cycle have been funded with a significant amount of money from individuals, not corporations, and individual spending was not even at issue in Citizens United." https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-and-citizens-united

2. Money spent on speech is obviously speech, whether by individuals or corporations. The New York Times is a corporation, and last year they spent $785 million on various operations, almost all related to free speech. If Citizens United were decided the other way, Congress could pass laws preventing the New York Times from spending money, and that would not be a violation of the first amendment. Does that seem reasonable? What if environmental groups wanted to put out documentaries on climate change and that was considered political speech and they were banned from spending any money to produce that documentary. Would that be legitimate and since it's only a restriction of spending money, it's not a first amendment violation?

3. Political spending doesn't buy elections. In 2020, Bloomberg and Steyer and their various PACs spent $600 million, more than the spending of all other candidates combined. If money = votes you'd expect they'd get at least half the votes right? In reality they combined for just 7% of the votes. Money does help, and particularly for lesser known candidates or causes money can help with name recognition, but for every election and policy, it almost definitely goes the way it does due to more people voting for one side because it aligns with their views, rather than them being brainwashed and going along with ads paid for by PACs