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

My opponent attempted to deny my precedent citation any relevance to this debate. Dartmouth College was a landmark decision in corporate law pertaining to the application of the Contract Clause of the U.S. Constitution and whether it extended to private corporations. I suggested this case in conjunction with Santa Clara because the former set the stage by recognizing that corporations are entitled to some Constitutional protections; the latter pertained to railroad taxation and included a peculiar headnote issued by the court reporter suggesting that the Court assumed that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extended to corporations as well as natural persons. It was a mere headnote, but a historically important one that has been cited in succeeding opinions. It effectively set the stage for the concept of corporate personhood. So I"m not sure why my opponent attempted to deny these cases any relevance to the debate. As for my opponent"s citations, the Court ruled in Paul v. Virginia that insurance is not considered a type of commerce and thus not subject to federal regulation. The Company lawyers had tried to argue that corporations were "citizens" as defined in the Privileges and Immunities clause (Article IV)"citizens, not people. Hence the Court denied corporations citizenship"I decision with which I firmly agree. In Munn v. Illinois, the Court upheld the federal government"s power to regulate private industries. Where the issue of corporate personhood cam up is beyond me. Organizations can and do speak as a single unit; by what authority, however, does an organization speak for all its members? The answer to this question depends on some rule of consensus. Such a rule would establish the who and what of representational speech, i.e., who is authorized to speak on the group"s behalf. In the case of corporations, e.g., if a majority of the board of directors endorses a particular policy, it becomes the corporation"s formal position. Furthermore, it is consistent with our language to hold that the board"s intentional public criticism of prevailing orthodoxy is corporate dissent. One example of such a situation might be the populist climate of the 1890"s. If such a tumultuous situation existed today, a state might adopt a huge marginal tax rate on corporate income. Were this to happen, a corporation"s board of directors would surely oppose such legislation as an ideological attack on the rich. Given such possibilities, the problem of collective intent becomes more tenuous. Thus we have 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. While it is perfectly natural for disagreement to exist within corporate ranks, that alone does not disqualify the organization from acting as a dissident. Moreover, such a view comports with how we commonly think of corporate behavior. We do not sensibly assume that any and all constituents of a corporation agree with its official views. So long as the dissident views and actions of spokespersons are consistent with the group"s purpose (e.g., the NAACP"s aim to identify, curb, and eliminate political racism), the legitimacy of the group"s dissidence remains: there is a meaningful nexus between a group"s statements and its governing objectives. Finally, denying a group--such as a corporation--the ability to speak to this or that extent on the basis of its supposed treasury size is an attack on speaker identity, which requires the highest scrutiny of the court. Such denial also is inconsistent if it extends to all corporations (as the BCRA did, e.g.), since not all incorporated organizations are the giants Wal-Mart and McDonald's; nearly all businesses--from Mom-and-Pop stores to local diners to movie theatre franchises and big box stores--are incorporated nowadays. Consequently the intent behind reform--to limit the influence of money in politics--overextends itself to groups that never were on the radar. To reiterate, money is essential for any political actor--whether an ordinary citizen, an election candidate, or a political action group. Political events such as speeches and conventions involve a great deal of material costs: technical expenses such as lighting and sound; costs to publicize the event; payments to rent the venue; and airtime expenditures to advertise the event. Even an activity as minor as writing a political blog requires monetary payment (insofar as the blogger wants to use his own domain name). Hence any limit that the government places on resources for speech places a limit on the speech itself. The evil connotation we tend to attach to money-in-politics does not suffice to fairly consider its real role in political engagement.