Whitewater Scotus Updates

Hello everyone and welcome back to another week at the Supreme Court. This week we are talking about perhaps one of the most impactful and some might say problematic Supreme Court cases in the last 20 years. Citizens United v. FEC is often simply referred to as “Citizens United” because it simple. It is also one of the only simple things about this case. My goal today is to try to distill it as much as possible.

 First things first, I will tell you what it means. Citizens United overruled a long-standing court decision that limited the amount of money that corporations could spend on political campaigns. What this did was allow corporations to act as “people” and thus are required by the Constitution to be able to use their finances to influence campaigns (like commercials, ads, donations to help a politician win an election) as much as they like. Across the last 3 presidential elections, the amount of money spent each election has more than doubled to nearly 10 billion in total spending in the 2020 presidential election. The idea was a conservative non-profit group sued the FEC after they stopped Citizens United from airing a movie that criticized Hillary Clinton leading up to the 2008 presidential election. The idea by the justices who voted in favor of Citizens United (it was a 5-4 vote, so very close) was that the money would be transparent and obviously not corrupt. However, the past election cycles and studies down have found that not to be the case. The reason being is that these corporations can get their money from anywhere, and they are not required to say where it is from. This means that if someone from anywhere in the world wanted a specific politician to win for their gain, they can give money and no one in the US would know where it came from.

That is all this week, I know it was slightly dark, but it is an important case to understand when looking at presidential elections. See you next week!

In the first blog, I will briefly be going over how the Supreme Court of the United States works. It functions as the highest body of law in the country and serves to clarify and better understand this countries texts, primarily including the Constitution. When a case is going to go to the Supreme Court, it must be sent there by a lower court. A lower court is any court that is not the Supreme Court. The courts are made up of three levels, District courts, which are all over the country, Courts of Appeal, which are split up among districts of states, and the Supreme Court. When a case arrives at the lowest level, the District court, it will be resolved. If one of the parties in the case is unhappy with the result, they can appeal the case up to the next level and it will be heard. If they want to take the case to the highest level; however, it is not guaranteed. The Supreme Court is unique in that it gets to decide if it wants to hear a case and argue it. There are 9 judges on the Court called Justices. When someone wants their case to be heard by these guys, they all read the information about it, then they take a vote. When they are deciding if they even want to hear it, only 4 of the justices need to agree, whereas when they are actually deciding the case, they need 5. After a decision is made, one of the justices is put in charge of writing the “opinion” of the court. The opinion is the legal explanation of why the justices made the decision they did. This helps the lower courts handle situations that are similar in the future.