We’re Working on Overturning the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision – Ask Us Anything!

January 21st is the 5th Anniversary of the disastrous Supreme Court Citizens United v. FEC decision that unleashed the floodgates of money from special interests.

Hundreds of groups across the country are working hard to overturn Citizens United. To raise awareness about all the progress that has happened behind the scenes in the past five years, we’ve organized a few people on the front lines to share the latest.

Aquene Freechild (u/a_freechild) from Public Citizen (u/citizen_moxie)

Daniel Lee (u/ercleida) from Move to Amend

John Bonifaz (u/johnbonifaz1) from Free Speech for People

Lisa Graves (u/LisafromCMD) from Center for Media and Democracy

Zephyr Teachout, former candidate for Governor of NY

My Proof: https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/555449391252000768

EDIT (1/15/15) Hey everyone! I've organized some of the participants from yesterday to spend some more time today going through the comments and answering some more questions. We had 5 people scheduled from 3-5pm yesterday...and obviously this post was much more popular than what two hours could allow, so a few members had to leave. Give us some time and we'll be responding more today. Thanks!

EDIT: Aquene Freechild and John Bonifaz have left the discussion. Myself and the others will continue to answer your questions. Let's keep the discussion going! It's been great experience talking about these issues with the reddit community.

EDIT: Wow! Thanks for everyone who has been participating and keeping the conversation going. Some of our participants have to leave at 5pm, but I'll stick around to answer more questions.

EDIT: Front page! Awesome to see so much interest in this topic. Thanks so much for all your questions!

EDIT: Thanks everyone for the great discussion! This was organized from various locations and timezones so all the key participants have had to leave (3pm-5pm EST scheduled). I know there are outstanding questions, and over tonight and tomorrow I will get the organizations responses and continue to post. Thanks again!

EDIT: Feel free to PM me with any further questions, ideas, critiques, etc. I'll try and get back to everyone as quickly as I can.

Comments: 2755 • Responses: 7  • Date: 

SaroDarksbane1820 karma

The Citizens United case was about a non-profit organization that wanted to air an advertisement for a film they made that was critical of a politician, and was told by the government that is was illegal for them to do so.

  • By overturning this decision, aren't you advocating that the government have the legal right to censor political speech?
  • The eventual supreme court decision was that censoring political speech (especially during an election) was against the first amendment. Why do you disagree with that opinion?
  • Are you worried that allowing government censorship of political speech could ever backfire against you or the causes you support, should the reins of power be handed to politicians who disagree with you?
  • For any political opinion you hold, how much money would a politician of the opposite opinion have to spend on advertisements to cause you to vote against your opinion at the polls?

EDIT: Bonus questions:

  • Do you believe people should be able to spend their own, personal money on political activism?
  • If so, won't limiting the ability of people to pool their money for political purposes create a system where only people with large personal fortunes can be heard?

citizen_moxie323 karma

Thanks for the questions! Most of the participants have left but I've forwarded your post to them asking for their replies. I'll update this as I receive them. We were only scheduled until 5pm...but your questions are important and deserve a well-formulated response from the groups who were here earlier.

OmniscientUser2 karma

How do you take your coffee?

citizen_moxie8 karma

Through a enigmatic series of legal loopholes.