Stubborn lies, meet stubborn facts.

One of the most stubborn lies about Citizens United is the idea that its overruling of Austin v. Michigan COC was entirely sua sponte, that "no party asked the court to do it." One sees it in blog posts and in comments. We even saw it in the dissenting opinion, in which Justice Stevens claimed that "no one has argued to us that Austin’s rule has proved impracticable, and not a single for-profit corporation, union, or State has asked us to overrule it."

That meme is false, and it ends here. The appellants in Citizens United did ask the court to overrule Austin. Before going on to assess the case assuming "the continuing vitality of Austin," the appellant's original brief—filed January 9th, 2009, months before the court asked for further briefing on the issue—argued that:

Austin was wrongly decided and should be overruled. Austin’s assertion that the government has a compelling interest in forestalling “corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas” (494 U.S. at 660) is sharply at odds with the more venerated principle, articulated in Buckley [v. Valeo] and recently reaffirmed in Davis v. FEC, 128 S. Ct. 2759, 2773 (2008), that “[t]he First Amendment’s protection against governmental abridgment of free expression cannot properly be made to depend on a person’s financial ability to engage in public discussion.” Buckley, 424 U.S. at 49. Nor can it be reconciled with [First Nat'l Bank of Boston v.] Bellotti’s recognition that political speech is no less valuable “because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.” 435 U.S. at 776-77; see also id. (“[t]he inherent worth of the speech . . . does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual”). Indeed, Austin’s assertion that the government must police the “distorting effects” of corporate wealth on the marketplace of ideas (494 U.S. at 660) was rejected almost verbatim in Bellotti, which held that the fear that “corporations are wealthy and powerful and their views may drown out other points of view” could not justify suppression of corporations’ political speech. 435 U.S. at 789. Moreover, the “immense aggregations of wealth” of which Austin complained are accumulated as often by individuals as by corporations. And there is absolutely no reason to think that an advocacy group funded predominantly by one or two individuals—such as George Soros’s Fund for America or the Wyly brothers’ Republicans for Clean Air—is any more reflective of the public’s support for the group’s ideals than a group funded exclusively by for-profit corporations. The for-profit corporations, at least, must respond to their shareholders through their boards of directors.

Ap. Br. 30-31 (emphasis added); see also id., at 13-14 (Austin "was wrongly decided and should be overruled because it is flatly at odds with the well-established principle that First Amendment protection does not depend upon the identity of the speaker"). Even Justice Stevens' dissent undercut its own later contrary claim, tacitly recognizing that "Citizens United injected its request to overrule Austin" into its brief.

Whether or not this is a good argument is irrelevant; the issue is whether the court was asked to overrule Austin. It was. The next time you hear someone say different, you will know that they are either a liar or someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.