Who benefits?

I've had my disagreements with David Brooks, but I think he hit the nail squarely on the head yesterday evening, dispelling the bizarre notion that Citizens United will peculiarly help the GOP:

[The decision] will have this effect. What do corporations, when they go to Washington, what do they want? One, they want subsidies from Washington. Two, they want to crush small businesses who are hoping to compete with them by erecting regulatory hurdles.

So, I think they will use that money to try to essentially hurt small business, who don't have lobbyists, don't have money to spend. And I think both of those are very negative effects on the country.

I do not necessarily think it is great for the Republican Party and terrible for the Democratic Party, because when you look at who is willing to subsidize corporations and erect regulatory barriers, both parties actually do that. So, I think will have bad effects, but not necessarily partisan effects.

(And Brooks, keep in mind, thinks that the decision was bad, so he has no dog in defending it.) The only bum note here is the idea that parties are equally likely to serve such desires, but it's very obvious that the (all-but dogmatically deregulatory) GOP is far less likely to do so than the (dogmatically regulation-friendly) Democrats.

The contrary perception seems, to my mind, to be based on two precepts, one obsolete, the other wrong. The former is the idea that the GOP is the party of the rich. Not so. We know from exit polls that the rich are as divided as the rest of the nation, and even Democrats have conceded the point, albeit grudingly and backhandedly (e.g. What's the Matter with Kansas?). The latter is the unexamined assumption that "corporation" means PepsiCo or IBM. You have to understand that when we're talking about "corporations," we mean the corporate organizational form. This ruling applies equally to the Sierra Club, the ACLU, unions, and so forth. As Kennedy's opinion notes:

[The court has struck down many] restrictions [on speech] that have been attempted at different stages of the speech process … [and t]he law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corporations—including nonprofit advocacy corporations—either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election. Thus, the following acts would all be felonies under §441b: The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests; the National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban; and the American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech. … §441b would [even] seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds.

(Emphases added.) Think of ACSblog—the blog of the American Constitution Society, a liberal think tank and student group—for an example of the last.

It just isn't accurate to suggest that its partisan valence is one-sided, and to the extent that it is, as Brooks points out, the critics have the polarity backwards.