• atro_city@fedia.io
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    14 days ago

    As a non-USAian and not a lawyer, what is the difference between power and speech? Isn’t removing the power to “speak” (donating money) not an infringement on “free speech”?

    Edit: The article OP shared helped

    1. Doesn’t this violate Citizens United?

    No. As Dean Soifer put it: Citizens United “struck down a federal regulation that prohibited an already-empowered corporation from spending its resources in elections. Neither that case nor any other has addressed whether a state must grant political spending power in the first place.”

    It’s like bring born without a mouth: you can’t speak so there’s nothing to prevent --> no infringement on “free speech”.

    • Canaconda@lemmy.caOP
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      14 days ago

      Good question. TLDR speech is expression not capability

      Corporations are legal entities created by the government whose jurisdiction they operate. As such everything they are allowed to do is fundamentally authorized by the state that creates them.

      The video in the main link actually does a fantastic job of explaining this if you watch it through. Here is the relevant part to your question.