Well, I’ll agree with you that Pitchfork Ben isn’t exactly my idea of a model Senator, but the history of it is all but irrelevant. I mean, after all, it’s been pretty much proven that the framers of the 14^th Amendment had no intent to grant individual rights to corporations, and yet we’ve kept Santa Clara enshrined as the law of the land for 120 years, and no Justices but Douglas and Black have ever suggested changing it.

There is obviously a distinction between a third party expenditure and a first party expenditure, but I think it is a distinction without a difference. First National Bank v. Belotti was the first of this line of corporate speech cases, and it seems clear to me, rereading it, that the major distinction between Belotti and this Hillary movie case is that in Belotti, the legislation to abolish corporate election expenditures was passed to abolish specific speech– relating to a referendum on a graduated state income tax which businesses like the First National Bank opposed. This case would seem to be equally anti-speech to all sides, as it were, which makes it more of a time, place and manner restriction. There’s a compelling interest in running fair elections, and given the rather appalling history of corporate money in politics, from Standard Oil and the Railroads at the turn of the 20^th Century, to ITT in the Nixon administration (for younger readers, they paid for the Republican National Convention in 1972, in exchange for having antitrust charges dropped) to any number of examples today.