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Citizen's United

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Submitted By spartan888
Words 438
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Memo #4
The Citizen’s United decision drastically changed the campaign finance landscape. By allowing corporations to donated unlimited amounts of money to a politician’s campaign has opened the flood gates for even more money to be poured into the American political system. The only thing I agree with Samples on is that the act of giving money is a form of expression, but just like there are limits on the freedom of speech, there needs to be limits on campaign contributions. Samples points out that by limiting contributions you’re limiting the amount of ideas one can express, which at its core is correct, but when put into the real world, that argument does not hold up. It’s true that you can express your ideas more when you’re funded with 1 million dollars as oppose to 100k but with corporations that generate profits in the billions, how can it not drown out an individual that can only contribute 100 dollars. This brings up Raskin’s point that corporations should not be counted as a “person” on paper we have given the corporations many of the rights of a “person” for economic and financial reason, which is totally fine. But to extrapolate that to allow them to give unlimited amounts of “speech” aka money to a political candidate is ludicrous. It is naïve to think that the distortion concept of corruption is not happening because corporations can’t give directly to a candidate, but rather their campaign. It is very evident that even before the citizen’s united ruling that major corporations are influencing policy and legislation, if that weren’t true, why would corporations be spending billions on lobbying? Obviously if they’re still spending so much money they must be making a profit from it. The citizen’s united decision just opened another way for corporations to influence America politics even more. If we keep going down this road, I agree with Raskin that we

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