As Philip Terzian noted, Justice Thomas spoke at a law school this week where he addressed student questions about the Citizens United decision. Because it’s just plain fun to hear justices get candid—particularly Thomas and Scalia— I’m pulling out some quotes from the event:
It’s particularly fun to see the New York Times itself run this quote, and add:
Well, as long as the folks at the New York Times corporation have their free speech, why should we worry about anyone else’s? Back to Thomas, who explains that, Constitutionally speaking, free association + free speech = corporations that can speak.
“But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same.
Thomas then offers context for federal regulation of corporate speech, which pricks the notion that it’s always a well-intentioned action on behalf of the little guy:
“Go back and read why Tillman introduced that legislation,” Justice Thomas said, referring to Senator Benjamin Tillman. “Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.”
It is thus a mistake, the justice said, to applaud the regulation of corporate speech as “some sort of beatific action.”
Indeed, Sen. “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman is an unfortunate man to be a father of the campaign-finance reform movement. A proud racist who wanted to keep blacks from voting (at best) and “exterminate” them (at worst), he’s also the father of Jim Crow laws in South Carolina.
Campaign-finance activists usually skip over Tillman’s part in the establishment of campaign-finance law, preferring the mantles of Teddy Roosevelt and Elihu Root, but it was the Tillman Act that Obama himself referenced when he said, erroneously, in his State of the Union address, “last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”
Justice Kennedy also spoke this week to students, but declined to comment on Citizens United, with this bizarre response:
One questioner asked whether Kennedy felt “scolded” in the wake of the pointed criticisms of the opinion.
“He doesn’t,” Kennedy said cryptically, spurring laughter throughout the packed auditorium at Pepperdine University’s School of Law.
