The government may not restrict political speech simply because it emanates from a corporation, said the Supreme Court Thursday in its opinion in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case concerned efforts by the group Citizens United to distribute Hillary, the group’s unflattering film about then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in 2008. The Court’s ruling strikes down the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that makes it illegal for a corporation to engage in electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and within 60 days of a general election.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the opinion of the Court, rejected the idea that the government could restrict corporations from engaging in electioneering communications while carving out an exception for media corporations: “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.” Kennedy noted various problems with allowing such disparate treatment, including that

… the exemption would allow a conglomerate that owns both a media business and an unrelated business to influence or control the media in order to advance its overall business interest. At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue. This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment.

Supporters of limits on corporate speech argue that the Court is putting the rights of corporations ahead of the rights of citizens. Justice Antonin Scalia addressed this question well in footnote 7 of his concurring opinion:

The dissent says that “‘speech’” refers to oral communications of human beings, and since corporations are not human beings they cannot speak. … This is sophistry. The authorized spokesman of a corporation is a human being, who speaks on behalf of the human beings who have formed that association—just as the spokesman of an unincorporated association speaks on behalf of its members. The power to publish thoughts, no less than the power to speak thoughts, belongs only to human beings, but the dissent sees no problem with a corporation’s enjoying the freedom of the press.