On March 24, 2009, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart told the Supreme Court that the federal government possessed the lawful power to ban books if those books happened to mention the name of a candidate for federal office and were published by a corporate entity in the run-up to the federal election in which that candidate was competing.
"It's a 500-page book, and at the end it says, so vote for X, the government could ban that?" asked an incredulous Chief Justice John Roberts during that day's oral arguments in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Yes, the deputy solicitor general conceded. Under the government's theory of the case, that's precisely what he was saying. "We could prohibit the publication of the book," Stewart declared.
Ten months later, a majority of the Supreme Court rejected that view, overturning the campaign finance regulations at issue for violating the First Amendment. Among the dissenters was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was apparently untroubled by the censorious implications of the government's stance. Two years later, Ginsburg urged her colleagues to hear a new case that would give "the Court the opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates' allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway."
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