Fineman: There are more unintended consequences in this opinion than there a bachelor week-end in las Vegas. For example, corporate boardrooms are going to become political cockpits now. Because if you're saying that corporations are individuals that have full speech rights and can spend all they want on campaigns directly for candidates, then the decisions that are made by corporations in their boardrooms are going to be political acts. So it's going to get very controversial at the corporate leverl. That's an unintended consequence of this.

I want to focus on the special problem that now arises for judicial elections. Just last term, Justice Kennedy (who also wrote today’s majority opinion in Citizens United), recognized the inherent risk of corruption that comes when someone spends independently to try to influence the outcome of judicial elections.

In Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal, Justice Kennedy recognized the potential for bias of a judge whose election victory was helped by a $3 million independent contribution favoring the judge. He wrote the contributions created a “risk of actual bias” so “substantial” that due process required setting aside the court’s decision.

Today’s decision casts all that aside, engaging in the fiction that candidates do not feel beholden to those who engage in large, independent spending favoring the candidates (or bashing their opponents).

This is a bad enough fiction to apply to elections for accountable elected officials; it is much worse to apply to judicial elections, where we count on the impartiality and fairness of the judges hearing our cases. Justice Kennedy backed away from Caperton today, leading Justice Stevens to note in dissent that Citizens United “unleashes the floodgates of corporate and union general treasury spending in [judicial] races.”