valeo that restricting independent campaign expenditures violates the first amendment right to free speech. that ruling established the flawed precedent that money and speech are the same thing. another nail in the coffin of common sense. and the result? elections based too much on the ability to raise money and too little on the quality of ideas. too much on the dedication to fund-raising and too little on the public good. money and free speech are not the same thing. and it is a tortured logic to say they are. they may seem he comparable in the rarefied hallways of the supreme court, but not in the rough-and-tumble streets of political campaigns. we know this, and the super pacs writing these huge checks know it too. and they must be chuck -lg all the way to the bank, but the american people do not find this funny. infuriating perhaps, but definitely not funny. i don't think we can truly fix this broken system until we undo the false premise, the premise that spending money on elections is the same thing as the constitutional right of free speech. that can only be achieved if the court o

valeo, 1971, it left intact the long-standing distinction between first amendment rights of living individuals and corporations, legal, fictional persons. the 1982 case of f.e.s. vs. national right to work committee, justice rehnquist wrote for a unanimous court that it was proper to treat corporations more restrictively than people. how i wish that were the majority opinion of the court today. the further analysis in 1986 in f.e.c. vs. massachusetts citizens for life, though striking down restrictions on speech by a pro-life organization actually underscored the originalist understanding that when the constitution protects corporate speech, it only does so as a proxy for the underlying free speech rights of real living, breathing individuals. in that case a nonprofit organized and funded specifically for the purpose of bringing about a political goal, pro-life policies, was seen as having free speech rights only because of the rights of those individuals who funded it and organized it. when we talk about a corporation's first amendment rights, we should be using shorthand for the first amendm