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Why is the New York Times just noticing this?

Liberals (including President Obama) think the Supreme Court was wrong in Citizens United to say that corporations have free speech rights, but newspaper and book publishers are corporations. For some reason, the NYT is acting like it took a year to notice this hitch (which has been perfectly evident since the Citizens United litgation began in the lower courts). I guess the excuse for pretending not to see what was obvious is that it has been hoping to rely on the notion that some corporations have more rights than others. This new piece ? a column by Adam Liptak ? begins to concede that is an unworkable argument.

?There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not,? Justice Kennedy wrote in Citizens United....

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has reviewed the historical evidence. The bottom line, he said, is this: ?If ordinary business corporations lack First Amendment rights, so do those business corporations that we call media corporations.?

But Liptak's column peters out with a quote from a lawrpof who calls it a "difficult question" and...

There good arguments both ways about whether corporations ought to be covered by the First Amendment. But it is harder to say that some corporations have First Amendment rights and others do not.

Yes, yes, it's obvious what the answer needs to be, and yet the debate must go on and on because it's so important to restrict the speech of people who organize themselves into corporations. Some of them. The bad guys. Not the good guys, like the ones who take a year to getting around to half-conceding the crushingly obvious.

Full post as published by Althouse on February 07, 2011 (boomark / email).