On January 25, 2010, the United States Supreme Court held in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that regulations preventing corporations and unions from spending general treasury funds in elections are unconstitutional under the First Amendment. This landmark decision overturned a two-decades-old precedent that had found such regulations to be reasonable restrictions when applied to for-profit corporations, because of the danger that corporate political expenditures would undermine the integrity of the political process. The Citizens United majority justified its conclusion by maintaining that the corporate identity of the speaker never justifies suppression of political speech.
While political speech receives the greatest protection because of its role in our democratic form of self-government, commercial speech has traditionally received less protection, because consumers rely on such speech to inform their purchases. As a result, political-speech regulations are given strict scrutiny, whereas commercial speech regulations are met with the less stringent standard of intermediate scrutiny. This Article argues that political speech of for-profit corporations should be treated more like commercial speech than pure political speech because due to the legally imposed obligation of for-profit corporations to maximize profits, there is a legally imposed profit motive when for-profit corporations engage in political speech that does not necessarily correlate with popular support for the ideas espoused by such speech. For these reasons, this Article argues that regulations of political speech by for-profit corporations should be treated with less exacting scrutiny when the democratically elected branches of government have determined that limiting such speech serves an important government interest.