People have a right to unlimited spending on their own political speech.

To repeat, contributions/donations are not the concern here. I am concerned with money/resources that a political actor may use for its own political speech, not to give to other people for their use. if however, my opponent wants to extend the argument to donations, I can provide some information below to rebut the oft-made claim that organizations are now out-spending/donating the average Jane and Joe to an extent that mutes them. As professors of mine have said themselves, both of the cases I have mentioned have been cited numerous times in cases and articles regarding the speech rights of organizations. I'm not sure if my opponent"s objection is due to misconstrual or simply ignoring the citations; either way there seems to be an impasse regarding legal precedent. The fact that the very term "corporate personhood" happens not to pop up after hitting Ctrl+F does not render the decisions irrelevant. The term "consensus" is not synonymous with "majority," nor does the former even imply the latter, as my opponent suggests. To reiterate, different sorts of organizations have different ways of making decisions. It would be naive and impractical to expect a large organization to defer to raw popular votes to make each of its decisions. My opponent seems to have missed a part of my last rebuttal on this matter, so let me repeat. There is a distinction between the authorized intent of a group and the individual intent of its members: the validity of the former does not depend on the unanimity of the latter. We cannot sensibly expect the members of enormous groups to agree on each and every one of the group"s policies without question. Again, so long as the group"s views are consistent with its purpose, its dissidence is legitimate. To suggest that we ordinary folk have "a minimal if [not] nonexistent causal impact on public policy," as my opponent does, is to make a rather heavy, fatalistic claim that is at best, rhetorical; at worst, self-defeating. It we took it to be true then we"d have no reason for civic engagement. Petitioning, protesting, and other means of addressing sociopolitical issues (means all protected by the First Amendment, I should note) all serve to dissent, to complain to the government about decisions it has made with which one may not agree (including the very issue of corporate speech). I highly doubt we are at a point where we can claim such means have reached a point of futility. As for the matter of legislators being distracted with fundraising, my opponent uses a red herring to evade the issue, which, once again, does not extend to donations. Indeed our representatives spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to get money for reelection, but this issue would not be resolved by campaign finance reform. Indeed, the problem stems in part from reform itself: raising large amounts of money from a greater number of donors with less money each (as would result from reform) would actually increase the amount of time a political candidate must spend appealing to donors. Citizens United did not cause a massive spike in political spending, corporate or otherwise. Yes, some corporations have made large contributions to a handful of Super PACs, but such contributions are very rare, as verified by the figures from the FEC, Center for Responsive Politics, and the Campaign Finance Institute. Also, the corporations that have contributed to Super PACs are found more on Main Street than Wall Street. Not one Fortune 100 Company has contributed a dime to any of the major Super PACs during the election cycles since Citizens United. The few exceptions there were to this fact were not mammoth contributions or expenditures as feared by catastrophizers of the Citizens United decision. [See Open Secrets List of Highest Grossing Super PACs] Finally, a rebuttal often made by campaign finance reform proponents--one that my opponent seems to have invoked in this debate--is that the distinction between independent expenditures and campaign contributions is mere hairsplitting: the former is merely one step removed from the latter. This is a dangerous rebuttal that suggests it is wrong that there happens to be some overlap between the opinion of a group of citizens and the agenda of a politician. There is nothing wrong with this--indeed, this is democratic politics in action. To suggest that such overlap is somehow corrupt is, frankly, wrongheaded. It is antithetical for a republican government to limit political speech, never mind political speech near the time of an election. To bar such speech on account of the speaker's identity calls such restriction only into further questioning. As stated in the case of Buckley v. Valeo, the "concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment" (424 U.S. 1, 48-49). This was among the more incisive remarks that the Court made in its opinion.