James L. Buckley Quotes

The Supreme Court has equated money with free speech.

The next time you download a book on Kindle, buy a Michael Moore screed at Barnes & Noble, or order up a political movie from video on demand, remember that it is the Supreme Court's decision in 'Citizens United' that guarantees you the right to do so.

The DISCLOSE Act is a testament to the wisdom of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United. The First Amendment sought to place political speech beyond the government's control, and we can be glad that it did.

The decision in Citizens United said that money equals speech, a position that I - and a vast majority of Americans, in poll after poll - could not disagree with more.

Citizens United fought to defend our right to free speech - and won a great victory in the United States Supreme Court.

The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

While money is used to finance speech, money is not speech.

In 'Citizens United v. FEC', the Supreme Court ruled that sections of the federal campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold imposed unconstitutional restrictions on the First Amendment rights of corporations.

As a consequence, the Court ruled that the limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment, but it accepted the $1,000 limit on individual contributions on the ground that the need to avoid the appearance of corruption justified this limited constraint on speech.

There is no reason for the government to limit political speech.

I can think of few plainer, more direct abridgments of the freedoms of the 1st Amendment than to compel persons to support candidates, parties, ideologies or causes that they are against.

A few people have big free speech and the rest of us have little free speech. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was decided wrongly.

The most misguided, naïve, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court … in the 21st century. To somehow view money as not having a corrupting effect on an election flies in the face of reality. I just think that just one of the five had run for county sheriff. I guarantee you … there will be scandals. There is too much money washing around political campaigns today, and it will take scandals and maybe the Supreme Court will go back and revisit this issue

Money is not speech, it is money. But the expenditure of money enables speech, and that expenditure is often necessary to communicate a message, particularly in a political context. A law that forbade the expenditure of money to communicate could effectively suppress the message.

Our current Supreme Court, in the Citizens United case, took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years [gifts to politicians] and renamed it legitimate..

Political speech is indispensable to decision-making in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice. The Government may not by these means deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration. The First Amendment protects speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.

I'm not backed by the super PACs and the big corporations.

Because Republicans have no ideas, they want to turn elections into the battle of dollars.

If money is a form of speech, as the Supreme Court has regrettably found, rich donors will always be the loudest speakers.

Our Supreme Court has lifted the practice of buying legislation to the level of a constitutional principle by repeatedly protecting corporate spending for and against political candidates, as well as promises and threats of such spending to bribe and blackmail such candidates, by appeal to the free-speech clause of the First Amendment.

You watch the Supreme Court in action on these cases, and they are a conflicted court. However, when it comes to speech issues generally, the court has been protective.

In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.

There's nothing in the First Amendment that even remotely talks about spending money for political contests, and to say that an individual can spend as much of his or her own money as he or she wants constitutionally without any limitation, I think is just absurd.

And, you know, money is - the money edge is really dangerous to democracy. Because what you have right now - people have said to me that, look, you'll always be outspent, so how can you ever win?