What Exactly Is Citizens United?

Written by Nicole.

If you’re invested in U.S. politics, you’ve likely heard discussions on “Citizens United” — with discussions focusing on how it's impacted our elections. But, what exactly is Citizens United? And why are so many modern candidates advocating for its reversal?

Citizens United refers to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This landmark decision, established in 2010, creates precedent for corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections—leading directly to the creation of super PACs. 

Super PACs are committees that raise and spend unlimited funds to support or oppose candidates, but are legally obligated to operate separately without coordination with campaigns. Of course, this doesn’t reflect our political reality—there are a plethora of legal loopholes present. For example, in 2014, two spam Twitter accounts began tweeting seemingly meaningless numbers: “NY- 48/36-56/33-59/19-25..” and so on, so forth. CNN reached out to the Republican party with questions—within three minutes, the accounts were deleted. It was later determined that these numbers corresponded to polling statistics conducted by super PACs, but because this information was considered public domain, it legally does not constitute coordination (check out Half As Interesting’s video “The Super Obvious Ways to Get Around Campaign Finance Laws for more examples!). 

Citizens United, a conservative non-profit, intended to distribute a film on Hillary Clinton, criticizing her 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Originally, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (AKA the BCRA) prohibited corporations and unions from creating advertisements mentioning a candidate close to an election. Citizens United challenged these restrictions, arguing that they restricted free speech. Citizens United passed by a slim 5-4 vote, and ultimately led to the strikedown of bans on independent political spending, suggesting that such spending doesn’t inherently lead to corruption. Essentially, they regarded money as equivalent to speech in political campaigns, and restriction on independent spending thus is a form of censorship. 

Since then, we’ve seen an extreme increase in billionaire spending in presidential elections. The organization, Americans for Tax Fairness, estimates that prior following Citizens United, billionaire spending increased from around $13-18 million dollars pre-2008, to upwards of $2.6 billion in the 2024 election. According to Oxfam International, one in six dollars spent by all U.S. candidates, parties and committees in the 2024 election came from 100 billionaire families. 

This unprecedented political spending equates to overwhelming influence in our political system—and as the wealth disparity in our country grows harsher and harsher, and individual constituent influence begins to shrink in the face of wealth, we must ask ourselves: how “democratic” is our democratic republic?

Check out our sources below.

https://campaignlegal.org/update/how-does-citizens-united-decision-still-affect-us-2026
https://campaignlegal.org/cases-actions/defending-federal-limits-corporate-spending-elections-citizens-united-v-fec
https://campaignlegal.org/update/super-pac-deals-are-bad-deal-democracy
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/citizens-united-15-years-later/
https://fortune.com/2026/01/23/billionaires-4000-times-more-like-hold-office-than-you-threat-democracy-oxfam-report/

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bcra

Made by a human—no AI was used in the creation of this work.