By Adam Call Roberts

Two years ago, filmmaker Alan Peterson wrote and directed “Hillary: The Movie.” Like most modern political documentaries, it was a Michael Moore-style hit piece, with snarky cheap shots and sketchy facts. You know, pretty much the same way we Americans have been propagandizing since the days of Sam Adams.

Citizens United, a nonprofit group, arranged to show Peterson’s film via pay-per-view. It should have been broadcast, talked about and quickly forgotten. Instead, it’s been the most talked about 2-D movie of the year.

The Federal Election Commission decided that broadcasting the movie and commercials promoting the movie was illegal because the documentary was too close to being a campaign ad. It pretty clearly advocated the defeat of a specific candidate – that was the point.  

Now, if Peterson was one of the rare people who is rich enough to make a movie with his own money, the broadcast would have been fine. But because he had to incorporate his money with other peoples’, his film was banned.

So, after some litigation, the Supreme Court ruled that the part of the McCain-Feingold Act that censored “Hillary: The Movie” was unconstitutional. The right to talk about political elections in public was upheld.

The reaction from people who didn’t like the movie has been outrage.

First, a clarification. President Barack Obama was either lying or misinformed (I’m not sure which would be worse) when he said the Supreme Court ruling allows “special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”

The ruling explicitly upholds limits on campaign donations. The only thing that’s different is the ability of incorporated associations of people to create campaign ads and have them aired during election season. 

Large corporations who wanted to advertise had already been forming political action committees to get around the law anyway. From a practical standpoint, the ruling simply makes it easier for small non-profit and for-profit groups to weigh in on elections.

Many critics have tried to turn this into a debate over corporate personhood.  Corporate personhood is a topic for interesting and important discussion, but completely irrelevant when it comes to the First Amendment.

Artificial intelligence has come pretty far in the year 2010, but it’s still people who are coming up with the ideas, writing the scripts, shooting the footage, editing the video and telling the stories.  Even if it weren’t, free speech is free speech, regardless of who or what the speaker is.  If my non-person barstool magically came to life and began to orate about the national debt, I would have the First Amendment right to hear that speech and to watch it on television.

Justice Scalia makes my point more eloquently in his concurring opinion:

“The Amendment is written in terms of ‘speech,’ not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker, from single individuals to partnerships of individuals, to unincorporated associations of individuals, to incorporated associations of individuals.”

Backers of the campaign finance laws worry that this ruling will allow large, wealthy corporations to flood our televisions with their speech, drowning out that of poorer groups and individuals.  I doubt many companies will want to risk offending consumers with political ads, but it’s a legitimate concern.  Washington is already being bought and sold enough.

But we’re left with the classic problem the First Amendment creates for legislators.  There’s simply no way to stop the “bad guys” from speaking without stopping the “good guys” from speaking as well.  The same law that prevented ExxonMobile from running campaign ads also prevented the ACLU from running one.  If this law had been upheld, it could have been considered constitutional for Congress to bar Random House (a corporation) from publishing politically charged books during election season.  Or, because all Internet service providers are incorporated, Congress conceivably could have been able to censor your Facebook notes and your tweets if it wanted to.

There’s still hope to develop sound, constitutional campaign finance reform.  But we need reform that results in more speech, not less.

Adam Call Roberts is a columnist for The Arkansas Traveler. He also blogs regularly for UATrav.com.