Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
Page Number: 521

360  CITIZENS  UNITED  v.  FEDERAL  ELECTION  COMM’N 

Opinion of the Court 

The  appearance  of  inﬂuence  or  access,  furthermore,  will 
not  cause  the  electorate  to  lose  faith  in  our  democracy.  By 
deﬁnition,  an  independent  expenditure  is  political  speech 
presented  to  the  electorate  that  is  not  coordinated  with  a 
candidate.  See Buckley, supra, at 46.  The fact that a cor­
poration, or any other speaker, is willing to spend money to 
try to persuade voters presupposes that the people have the 
ultimate inﬂuence over elected ofﬁcials.  This is inconsistent 
with any suggestion that the electorate will refuse “ ‘to take 
part in democratic governance’ ” because of additional politi­
cal speech made by a corporation or any other speaker.  Mc­
Connell,  supra,  at  144  (quoting  Nixon  v.  Shrink  Missouri 
Government PAC, 528 U. S. 377, 390 (2000)). 

Caperton v.  A. T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U. S. 868 (2009), is 
not  to  the  contrary.  Caperton  held  that  a  judge  was  re­
quired  to  recuse  himself  “when  a  person  with  a  personal 
stake in a particular case had a signiﬁcant and disproportion­
ate inﬂuence in placing the judge on the case by raising funds 
or directing the judge’s election campaign when the case was 
pending  or imminent.”  Id.,  at  884.  The remedy  of  recusal 
was  based  on  a  litigant’s  due  process  right  to  a  fair  trial 
before an unbiased judge.  See Withrow v.  Larkin, 421 U. S. 
35,  46  (1975).  Caperton’s  holding  was  limited  to  the  rule 
that the judge must be recused, not that the litigant’s politi­
cal speech could be banned. 

The McConnell record was “over 100,000 pages” long, Mc­
Connell I, 251  F. Supp. 2d, at  209, yet it “does  not have any 
direct  examples  of  votes  being  exchanged  for  .  .  .  expendi­
tures,”  id.,  at  560  (opinion  of  Kollar-Kotelly,  J.).  This  con­
ﬁrms Buckley’s reasoning that independent expenditures do 
not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corrup­
tion.  In fact, there is only scant evidence that independent 
expenditures  even  ingratiate.  See  251  F.  Supp.  2d,  at  555– 
557  (opinion  of  Kollar-Kotelly,  J.).  Ingratiation  and  access, 
in  any  event,  are  not  corruption.  The  BCRA  record  estab­
lishes  that  certain  donations  to  political  parties,  called  “soft