JBeukema
Rookie
- Banned
- #1
IN JANUARY 2008, James Bopp got laughed out of courtliterally...
No one was laughing two years later, when the Supreme Court reversed Lamberth's ruling and adopted many of Bopp's argumentsa decision that wiped out 100 years of precedent in campaign-finance law. Building on a key 1976 decision that campaign spending was a form of speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment, the justices in Citizens United v. FEC extended that protection to corporations. They ruled that corporations (which already are considered "persons" for many constitutional purposes) have First Amendment rights similar to those of average voters, and keeping them from spending money to support or defeat specific candidates is unconstitutional.
Citizens United was the culmination of years of work by Bopp to chip away at the nation's campaign-finance regulations, often via obscure cases no one expected him to win. But Bopp's not donenot by a long stretch. Today, the 63-year-old lawyer is pursuing challenges to dismantle practically every facet of campaign-finance regulation. Taken individually, many of those cases look just as preposterous and doomed as Citizens United did in 2008. But laugh at your peril.
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