Conservatives have stacked the courts with Judges whose ideology supports the money = speech. The incumbents weren't all around as the GOP's long term goals were pursued.
You are showing your partisanship again. To be fair, I used to think the same way, until someone sat me down and showed me just how stupid what I was saying is.
The courts have not ruled that money is the same as speech, they just have ruled that restricting the ability to spend money is equivalent to restricting a persons right to speak.
Let us look at some other things money is not.
I know of no liberal who would try to argue that money is abortion, yet every one of them screamed to high heaven when Bush restricted spending money on abortion providers oversees, because they knew that this effectively restricted the access to abortions.
Is money education?
Again the answer is no, but if the government suddenly declared that no one could spend any of their own money on education I think everyone would agree that would restrict everyone's access to education.
If you are running for office, and the law says that you can only spend $5000 dollars to purchase ads, I am not restricting your speech, but I am restricting your ability to make your speech heard. How many TV and/or newspaper ads do you think you can buy with that amount of money?
Citizen's United (the latest case on this issue, and the one Obama mentioned in his State of the Union address) was bad law because it tried to restrict the ability of non profits to spend money in a 90 day window before an election. Congress knew that there could be no possible justification for simply telling a corporation (a group of people) that they could not purchase ads (talk) ever, so they tried to pretty it up by saying that they could not do so with the intention of influencing elections (talk about politics) within 90 days of an election with their own money.
This might sound noble and high minded, but the real meaning is that if I get together with friends I can only talk about the election if someone else pays for it. You might think this is ridiculous, but it is exactly what has happened in some states. Neighborhood groups got together, and were prohibited from using any of their own money to promote a point of view, they could only spend money if they could prove it came from outside sources. This law was designed to directly benefit incumbents, and had no other purpose than to strengthen their hold on office, which is why it actually received bipartisan support.
Restricting how much money I can spend effectively restricts my free speech, because the only way speech is heard is if you pay for advertising. As a result of this law being overturned labor unions were able to spend 10 million dollars in Arkansas to try and defeat Blanch Lincoln. this would have been impossible last year because they would have been unable to spend their money in that 90 day window before the election. (By the way, despite effectively spending their entire war chest on one election that they viewed as key, they were unable to actually purchase the senate seat in Arkansas. Just goes to prove that the predictions of doom were wrong.)
