Citizens United was a 2010 United States Supreme Court decision in which the Supreme Court held, 5 to 4, that corporations and associations of all types have a free speech right to spend their money in support of electioneering in any fashion they wanted. A Federal law had restricted that.
Many people were shocked by the decision and feel that it allows all sorts of organizations, including business corporations, non profit corporations and associations, to influence elections this way. It's easy for nearly anybody to find a group that they're really upset with this way and therefor being angry over Citizens United is easy. People who dislike the NRA, for example, will point to it. People who dislike Planned Parenthood will point to it.
Hence the larger problem. Coming together in an organization dedicated to promoting your views really is a type of conduct that most Americans support. People don't like it if its somebody else's point of view they disagree with. They do like it if its their own point of view.. So pretty obviously something going very far in the nature of repealing Citizens United will make almost everyone mad.
By the same token, this gets into the really interesting current world view on associations. Corporations are regarded, as we well know, as people in the eyes of the law. If that's the case, they'd have free speech rights like other people, even if they aren't really people. They aren't people, of course, in the natural sense, so hence the level of frustration expressed here. But does that mean that if we're going to take that on, we're going to take some of the larger legal fiction on?
Anyhow, petitions have been circulating nationwide to hold a Constitutional Convention to amend the constitution in order to repeal Citizens United. The problem is, you can't do that.
Oh, you can hold a Constitutional Amendment alright, and I think there's been proposals for one nearly my entire adult life. But you can't hold one on one topic. The last time that was tried it was when a convention was held to fix the Articles of Confederation. . . and that yielded the Constitution.
That is, once you assemble a Constitutional Convention, there's no earthly way to restrain it. You can't tell it what to address, and you can't even tell it when to shut down and go home. So you have to ask yourself if you really want a Constitutional Convention in the current political atmosphere.
It sounds all fine and dandy if you assume that everyone thinks just the way you do, but they don't. At a Constitutional Convention there would be proposals to repeal lots of Supreme Court decisions. Okay, that may suit you, but you should ponder it. Among those that would surely be the subject of somebody's proposed amendment would undoubtedly be:
Citizens United (duh).
Obergfell
Roe v. Wade
District of Columbia v. Heller
Unless you are in the rare group of people who would support all of these, and more, being address by Constitutional amendments, you ought to probably think twice about gathering a group of folks to tackle the U.S. Constitution. I'm not saying I agree with all of these decisions. I don't. But. . . beware. . .
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