The irony of those protests is you had groups of people 
 getting together to speak out against a Supreme Court decision
that protected the right of people to get together and speak out.
Moments ago, the Federal Election Commission made their ruling.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to say
We won!
I am a Super PAC, and so can you!
If you've been following the 2012 Presidential Campaign
there's a good chance you've heard something in the news about Super PACs.
But you may be wondering what exactly is a Super PAC.
Well at their most basic level, Super PACs are just groups of 
 individuals who pool their money to spend on political speech.
They don't give any money directly to political candidates.
Instead, they spend their money speaking directly to American voters.
Some people are very upset about the rise of Super PACs 
 because they associate them the Supreme Court's ruling in
Citizens United
And we saw this most recently with the Occupy the Courts 
 protest, marking the two year anniversary of that decision.
Now the irony of those protests is you had groups 
 of people getting together to speak out against
a Supreme Court decision that protected the right of 
 people to get together and speak out.
But regardless of what you think of Citizens United, it's 
 only indirectly related to the rise of Super PACs.
For that, we have to look to a different court decision, called SpeechNow.org.
SpeechNow was a group of people who wanted to pool money, to 
 run ads for, or against candidates, based on their position
on the First Amendment.
Now the Supreme Court has held for over thirty-five years that an 
 individual acting alone can spend an unlimited amount of their own money
on these kinds of ads.
But under federal law, if two or more people get together, 
 they were limited to putting in five thousand dollars apiece.
So this meant that Bill Gates could spend a billion dollars on 
 ads saying, vote for, or vote against a candidate
but if you got together with your neighbor, you'd 
 be limited to spending ten thousand dollars total.
If one person can do it, why not two or more?
The First Amendment, after all, protects both the 
 right to speak and the right to associate.
So, the Institute for Justice, and the Center for 
 Competitive Politics represented SpeechNow in a lawsuit
to strike down this prohibition.  SpeechNow won and the government
changed the rules to allow for the creation of Super PACs.
which are really just doing the same thing that wealthy 
 individuals have been allowed to do for decades.
There's no way to say, for sure, what effect Super PACs 
 are going to have on the 2012 election.
But we do know that groups are going to have 
 an easier time getting their message out to voters
and ultimately, that's what really matters.
All Super PACs can try to do is persuade voters, but voters are 
 the ones who decide who's going to be elected in this country.
So the real question raised by Super PACs is, are voters 
 going to be allowed to decide for themselves which messages
they want to consider before they cast their ballot, or is the government going to decide that for them?
To learn more, visit IJ.org
