Sept. 14 Daily News editorial

At least five of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices sounded as though they’re ready to open the flood gates to corporate and union money in federal elections, during last week’s oral arguments in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. If so, the hard-won McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2000 would become virtually meaningless. We could look for wealthy special interests to exert unprecedented influence on next year’s mid-term congressional elections.

For more than a century, corporations have been prohibited from contributing directly to federal campaigns. They can create political action committees to contribute to campaigns, but the PACs must be funded by individual contributions from employees and others. The corporation is not allowed to contribute from its treasury. Unions have had the same restrictions for more than six decades.

Removing these restrictions would entail overturning a number of court precedents, but most specifically two fairly recent rulings — Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce in 1990 and McConnel v. Federal Election Commission in 2003. In both cases, the court ruled that the restrictions on corporate and union contributions to federal campaigns did not infringe on First Amendment rights.

It would take a very activist court to now reverse course, tossing out election rules that have been in force for more than 100 years. But last Wednesday’s oral arguments suggested that a narrow majority of this court may be ready take that radical step. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia clearly expressed their willingness to lift the prohibition on corporate contributions. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. seemed skeptical of the restrictions on corporate giving. “We don’t trust our First Amendment rights to FEC bureaucrats,” said Roberts.

Assigning individual First Amendment rights to a corporate entity is a concept the court has never before embraced. As Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center said in an interview with Tony Mauro, legal correspondent for the First Amendment Center, “Since the dawn of the Republic, the court has recognized that corporations are artificial entities that enjoy unique advantages and must therefore be subject to greater government oversight. If the court turns its back on this constitutional text and history, it will blatantly disregard the will of the people and unleash corporate influence on elections.”

We fear that few politicians could resist that influence. The New York Times recently wrote that, “In the 2008 election cycle, Fortune 100 companies alone had combined revenues of $13.1 trillion and profits of $605 billion. That dwarfs the $1.5 billion that Federal Election Commission-registered political parties spent during the same election period, or the $1.2 billion spent by federal political action committees.”

Absent corporate spending restrictions, that’s nowhere near a level playing field.