The bottom line, for Scalia, was that, "The principle that such advocacy is 'at the heart of the First Amendment's protection' and is 'indispensable to decision making in a democracy' is 'no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual."
Continuing to quote from a plurality opinion in Pacific Gas, Scalia "rejected the arguments that corporate participation 'would exert an undue influence on the outcome of a referendum vote'; that corporations would 'drown out other points of view' and 'destroy the confidence of the people in the democratic process..."
He even quoted an opinion in the Grossjean case, writing that "corporations are guaranteed the 'freedom of speech and of the press...safeguarded by the due process of law clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.'"
The Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no "person" shall be denied "equal protection of the laws," was promulgated after the Civil War to free the slaves. But corporations have long asserted that because it says "person" rather than "natural person" it included giving, in 1868 when the Amendment was ratified into law, full Constitutional rights under the Bill of Rights to corporations. (Corporations are, at law, known as "artificial persons" and humans are "natural persons" - both have to have some sort of "personhood" in order to pay taxes, sue and be sued, etc.)
As Scalia wrote in his opinion in FEC v. Wisconsin Right To Life: "...FECA was directed to expenditures not just by 'individuals,' but by 'persons,' with 'persons' specifically defined to include 'corporation[s].'"
Chief Justice Roberts weighed in, too, in the main decision. It's a fascinating decision to read - and search for occurrences of the word "corporation" - and here's one of Roberts' more convoluted observations in defense of corporate free speech rights:
Accepting the notion that a ban on campaign speech could also embrace issue advocacy would call into question our holding in Bellotti that the corporate identity of a speaker does not strip corporations of all free speech rights. It would be a constitutional 'bait and switch' to conclude that corporate campaign speech may be banned in part because corporate issue advocacy is not, and then assert that corporate issue advocacy may be banned as well, pursuant to the same asserted compelling interest, through a broad conception of what constitutes the functional equivalent of campaign speech, or by relying on the inability to distinguish campaign speech from issue advocacy.
Bottom line - corporate free speech rights are Real Rights that Must Be Respected.
Justice Souter wrote a rather frightening dissent (this was a 5-4 decision, with the usual right-wing suspects on the "5" side): "Finally, it goes without saying that nothing has changed about the facts. In Justice Frankfurter's words, they demonstrate a threat to 'the integrity of our electoral process, which for a century now Congress has repeatedly found to be imperiled by corporate, and later union, money: witness the Tillman Act, Taft-Hartley, FECA, and BCRA.
"McConnell was our latest decision vindicating clear and reasonable boundaries that Congress has drawn to limit 'the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth,' and the decision could claim the justification of ongoing fact as well as decisional history in recognizing Congress's authority to protect the integrity of elections from the distortion of corporate and union funds.
"After today, the ban on contributions by corporations and unions and the limitation on their corrosive spending when they enter the political arena are open to easy circumvention, and the possibilities for regulating corporate and union campaign money are unclear.
"The ban on contributions will mean nothing much, now that companies and unions can save candidates the expense of advertising directly, simply by running 'issue ads' without express advocacy, or by funneling the money through an independent corporation like Wisconsin Right To Life."
Sounding almost depressed, Souter closed his dissent with these words: "I cannot tell what the future will force upon us, but I respectfully dissent from this judgment today."
The attempt of corporations (and their lawyers, like Roberts was before ascending to a federal court) to usurp American democracy is nothing new, as David Souter well knew. Fascism has always been a threat to democracy.
In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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