Ramtin Arablui and Randa Abdelfattah

That seems to be a critical moment for Citizens United.

Generally speaking, most people think it's okay for the government to regulate big money in politics and regulate campaign ads, which may influence people's views about the election and is where most of the money is spent.

But banning books sounds like something else.

And so Alito is kind of connecting the specter of book banning

that we're sort of familiar with and has this really ugly connotation with what the government was trying to argue in that case.

Yeah, it seems like a very intentional and calculated choice of metaphor in this case, right?

Because book bans, book burning, it has a very negative specifically connotation in most people's minds.

It's like the most dramatic form of censorship that we often think of.

But it's interesting then to apply the idea of censorship of free speech to corporate spending.

Yeah, I think the way that campaign finance reformers would present campaign finance regulation is we're not trying to swing the election one way or the other.

We're not trying to censor speech.

What we want to do is regulate how much influence people with a lot of money have over the election and equalize to some degree the amount of say we all have as citizens in a democracy.

But what Alito was doing was connecting campaign finance regulation with this worry about government making choices about what's acceptable speech and picking sides in the debate, which is much more in the conservative direction.

And one of the conservative anxieties about campaign finance regulation is the worry that that's what the government is trying to do in some sort of more subtle way.

And so instead of deciding Citizens United on this narrow question,

Instead, the court comes back and says, we want you to re-argue this case, re-brief this case.

We're going to do it over, but we're now going to engage this much larger question about whether the federal government constitutionally can prohibit corporate money from funding election speech.

In other words, the Supreme Court wanted to take on a much bigger question, one that had already been settled by decades of legal precedent.

Could the government really ban corporate spending on elections?

Did the free speech under the First Amendment right extend to corporations like it did to individual people?