Think you know Citizens United? The headlines got the heat, but the holding was far narrower than the myth. We walk through the real story—what the Court protected, what it left alone, and why the biggest shift in campaign money came from a different case altogether.

We start with the foundation set by Buckley v. Valeo, where the Court split campaign finance into two buckets: contributions to candidates, which can be limited to deter corruption, and independent expenditures, which are protected political speech. From there, we explain how McCain–Feingold tried to fence off the final days before elections by forcing certain speakers—non-media corporations—to route messages through PACs, all while keeping disclosure rules in place. That’s the backdrop for Citizens United, a case about a group wanting to release a film critical of a presidential candidate near an election. The majority framed that as core political speech and rejected a law that singled out specific speakers during the most crucial window for voters.

Here’s the twist: the ruling did not grant corporations unlimited power to bankroll candidates or say that “money is speech.” Coordination still turns spending into a restricted contribution, and contribution caps remain intact for direct support. The real engine of super PAC dominance was SpeechNow.org v. FEC, a lower court decision that treated donations to independent-expenditure-only committees as uncapped. That interpretation, left unchallenged, opened the floodgates for unlimited money just outside campaign walls while preserving the legal fiction of “no coordination.”

Along the way, we explore disclosure, the media exemption, Justice Stevens’s time-place-manner argument, and Justice Thomas’s concerns about chilling speech. We also dig into how super PACs operate in practice, why transparency matters for voter trust, and where smart reforms could land—tightening coordination definitions, stress-testing contribution limits to outside groups, and strengthening real-time disclosures. If you’ve wondered why elections feel louder and pricier than ever, and where the law drew—and blurred—the lines, this breakdown gives you the map.

If this helped clarify the difference between Citizens United and SpeechNow, follow the show, share with a friend who loves politics, and leave a quick review to tell us what case we should tackle next.

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