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348  CITIZENS  UNITED  v.  FEDERAL  ELECTION  COMM’N 

Opinion of the Court 

To  bypass  Buckley  and  Bellotti,  the  Austin  Court  identi­
ﬁed a new governmental interest in limiting political speech: 
an  antidistortion  interest.  Austin  found  a  compelling  gov­
ernmental interest in preventing “the corrosive and distort­
ing effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accu­
mulated  with  the  help  of  the  corporate  form  and  that  have 
little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corpora­
tion’s political ideas.”  494 U. S., at 660; see id., at 659 (citing 
MCFL, 479 U. S., at 257; NCPAC, 470 U. S., at 500–501). 

B 

The Court is thus confronted with conﬂicting lines of prec­
edent: a pre-Austin line that forbids restrictions on political 
speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity and a post-
Austin  line  that  permits  them.  No  case  before  Austin  had 
held that Congress could  prohibit independent expenditures 
for political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity. 
Before Austin, Congress had enacted legislation for this pur­
pose, and the Government urged the same proposition before 
this  Court.  See  MCFL,  supra,  at  257  (FEC  posited  that 
Congress  intended  to  “curb  the  political  inﬂuence  of  ‘those 
who  exercise  control  over  large  aggregations  of  capital’ ” 
(quoting Automobile Workers, 352 U. S., at 585)); California 
Medical  Assn.  v.  Federal  Election  Comm’n,  453  U. S.  182, 
201  (1981)  (Congress  believed that  “differing  structures  and 
purposes” of corporations and unions “may require different 
forms  of  regulation  in  order  to  protect  the  integrity  of  the 
electoral process”).  In  neither of these cases  did the Court 
adopt the proposition. 

In  its  defense  of  the  corporate-speech  restrictions  in 
§ 441b, the Government notes the antidistortion rationale on 
which Austin and its progeny rest in part, yet it all but aban­
dons reliance upon it.  It argues instead that two other com­
pelling interests support Austin’s holding that corporate ex­
penditure  restrictions  are  constitutional:  an  anticorruption 
interest,  see 494  U. S., at  678 (Stevens,  J., concurring),  and