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Page Number: 507

346  CITIZENS  UNITED  v.  FEDERAL  ELECTION  COMM’N 

Opinion of the Court 

Buckley did not consider § 610’s separate ban on corporate 
and  union  independent  expenditures,  the  prohibition  that 
had  also  been  in  the  background  in  CIO,  Automobile  Work­
ers, and Pipeﬁtters.  Had § 610 been challenged in the wake 
of  Buckley,  however,  it  could  not  have  been  squared  with 
the  reasoning  and  analysis  of  that  precedent.  See  WRTL, 
551 U. S., at 487 (opinion of Scalia, J.) (“Buckley might well 
have  been  the  last  word  on  limitations  on  independent  ex­
penditures”);  Austin,  494  U. S.,  at  683  (Scalia,  J.,  dissent­
ing).  The  expenditure  ban  invalidated  in  Buckley,  § 608(e), 
applied to corporations and unions, 424 U. S., at 23, 39, n. 45; 
and some of the prevailing plaintiffs in Buckley were corpo­
rations,  id.,  at  8.  The  Buckley  Court  did  not  invoke  the 
First  Amendment’s  overbreadth  doctrine,  see  Broadrick  v. 
Oklahoma, 413 U. S. 601, 615 (1973), to suggest that § 608(e)’s 
expenditure ban would have been constitutional if it had ap­
plied  only  to  corporations  and  not  to  individuals,  424  U. S., 
at  50.  Buckley  cited  with  approval  the  Automobile  Work­
ers  dissent,  which  argued  that  § 610  was  unconstitutional. 
424 U. S., at 43 (citing 352 U. S., at 595–596 (opinion of Doug­
las, J.)). 

Notwithstanding this precedent, Congress recodified 
§ 610’s  corporate  and  union  expenditure  ban  at  2  U. S. C. 
§ 441b four months after Buckley was decided.  See 90 Stat. 
490.  Section  441b  is  the  independent  expenditure  restric­
tion challenged here. 

Less than two years after Buckley, Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765, 
reafﬁrmed  the  First  Amendment  principle  that  the  Govern­
ment  cannot  restrict  political  speech  based  on  the  speaker’s 
corporate  identity.  Bellotti  could  not  have  been  clearer 
when it struck down a state-law prohibition on corporate in­
dependent expenditures related to referenda issues: 

“We thus ﬁnd no support in the First . . . Amendment, 
or in the decisions of this Court, for the proposition that 
speech that otherwise would be within the protection of 
the  First  Amendment  loses  that  protection  simply  be­