Citizens United
The Supreme Court case that decided money is speech and corporations are people — and transformed American elections overnight.
The short version
- The 2010 Supreme Court ruling struck down limits on what corporations, unions, and other organizations can spend on political advertising — as long as spending is 'independent' of candidates.
- It rests on two premises: that political spending is a form of protected speech, and that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individual citizens.
- Outside spending in federal elections has grown from roughly $338 million in 2008 to over $4.5 billion in 2020, with dark money — spending whose donors are never disclosed — exceeding $1 billion.
- The 'independent expenditure' distinction — the legal firewall between outside spending and campaigns — is widely understood to be a fiction enforced by no one.
What it is
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission originated as a narrow dispute. Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit, wanted to air a documentary called Hillary: The Movie during the 2008 Democratic primary period and advertise it on television. The FEC said no: the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold) prohibited corporations and unions from spending general treasury funds on 'electioneering communications' — defined as broadcast ads mentioning a candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. Citizens United sued. What began as a question about whether a documentary-length infomercial counted as electioneering ended as one of the most consequential campaign finance rulings in American history.
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and issued in January 2010, held that political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and that the government cannot restrict independent political expenditures by corporations, associations, or labor unions. The ruling overturned two prior precedents: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990), which had upheld restrictions on corporate political spending, and the relevant portions of McConnell v. FEC (2003), which had upheld key provisions of McCain-Feingold. Justice John Paul Stevens's 90-page dissent argued that the majority had invented a constitutional principle that nowhere existed in American law and that the framers would not have recognized.
What Citizens United directly authorized was the use of corporate and union general treasury funds for independent political expenditures — ads that advocate for or against candidates, as long as they are not 'coordinated' with a campaign. The ruling itself did not create Super PACs; that came from the D.C. Circuit's subsequent ruling in SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010), which extended Citizens United's logic to hold that if corporations could spend unlimited amounts independently, individuals could pool unlimited contributions into independent expenditure committees. These became Super PACs — political committees that can raise and spend unlimited sums, provided they disclose their donors and nominally operate independently of candidates. Citizens United also opened the door to 501(c)(4) 'social welfare' organizations, which can engage in political activity without disclosing donors at all — the dark money channel.
The legal architecture rests on two contested premises. First, that political spending is functionally equivalent to political speech — a position rooted in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), which held that spending money to express political views is inherently communicative. Second, that corporations possess First Amendment rights equivalent to those of natural persons — a claim that has historical roots but was contested even by justices who agreed with the outcome on other grounds. Justice Clarence Thomas has argued for even fewer restrictions; Justice Stevens argued that the corporation-as-person premise was never established by actual constitutional history. The debate over both premises continues to structure campaign finance law.
Why it matters
The numbers document a before-and-after. In the 2008 election cycle, total outside spending in federal elections was approximately $338 million. By 2020, it exceeded $4.5 billion. Dark money alone — spending by 501(c)(4) organizations that do not disclose their donors — topped $1 billion in the 2020 cycle, according to OpenSecrets. This is not a gradual trend; it is a structural break. The mechanisms Citizens United enabled have been used by donors and interest groups across the political spectrum, though conservatives were early and systematic adopters: the Koch network, the Federalist Society's donor network, and groups like Crossroads GPS pioneered the playbook before liberal equivalents scaled to match.
The 'independent expenditure' premise — the legal fiction at the center of the decision — holds that spending is not corrupting as long as it isn't coordinated with a candidate. In practice, 'independence' is often a formality. Campaign staff move to run Super PACs supporting their former candidates. Candidates appear at Super PAC fundraising events. The FEC, which is structurally designed to deadlock on partisan lines, rarely investigates coordination complaints. In 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort simultaneously worked for a pro-Trump Super PAC during a period when he was also advising the campaign. The legal barrier between campaigns and their outside support structures has been thin since Citizens United and has grown thinner.
Because spending equals speech under Citizens United, those with more money have more speech. In the 2020 election cycle, the top 100 donors to Super PACs contributed more than all 9.5 million small-dollar donors combined, according to a report from Issue One. A single donor, Sheldon Adelson, spent more than $200 million supporting Republican candidates in the 2020 cycle. This concentration of political voice is not incidental to Citizens United — it is its structural consequence. When the court removed limits on political spending, it removed limits on political inequality. The political speech of a billionaire and the political speech of a median-income American are no longer operating in remotely the same system.
The foreign money problem is underappreciated and unsolved. Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to U.S. political campaigns. Citizens United did not change this prohibition. But it created channels through which foreign money can enter the political system indirectly: through domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations, through dark money organizations that accept donations without disclosing their source, and through LLCs whose beneficial ownership is not required to be disclosed. The Senate Intelligence Committee's 2020 report documented foreign money flowing through dark money channels. The FEC lacks the investigative capacity and political will to systematically trace these flows. The result is that the wall between foreign influence and domestic elections has holes whose size is unknown.