The First Amendment is violated by the Congress passing laws that censor speech - the ruling overturns those laws.
The law limited speech by corporations.
In saying that it was unconstitutional, the implication is that First Amendment protections apply to corporations. More than an implication, actually, because the majority ruling explicitly makes that case (though most of the language is in the form of "doesn't not apply to").
The extension of constitutional rights and protections to corporations
is corporate personhood. It's not the idea that corporations are actually people, but rather that a court can extend certain legal rights and protections to corporations in the same way those rights and protections apply to persons, even if the text of the law does not. That is very much what the court is doing here.
That's why so much of the analysis of the case (by actual lawyers!) has
focused on and
debated the
concept of
corporate personhood.
The point is that independent of what one thinks of the merits of the ruling, corporate personhood was one of the primary legal issues involved. The experts all agree on that (again,
as a separate issue from how they feel about the ruling.
So my beef is that you mocked a bunch of other people for missing the point and talking about "a completely unrelated concept", only it turns out it's not unrelated, but pretty central to the case. If you're going to get all dismissive and sarky about other people missing the point, it behooves you to make sure they actually are.
It'd be like someone not just defending Titanic, but claiming that it's not a melodrama.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
If Malek or anyone else who's qualified wants to smack me down a bit here, I'd more than welcome it.
