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Oy. The first amendment is written so that it presupposes the existence of freedom of speech - it does not grant that freedom. It says congress can't pass laws to abridge it. So you don't know whether the law Congress passed abridges the freedom until you've defined the scope of the freedom. This really isn't so hard, guys.
The decision held, basically, that people who set up entities to act for themselves don't thereby have constricted speech rights just because they use a corporate form. That applies to the Sierra Club, ACLU, UAW, etc etc etc. It doesn't apply to campaign contributions but only to political speech. Campaign contributions are a different story entirely.
It seems to me that this decision should be more pro-NGO than pro-business (both of which tend to be organized in corporate form). Businesses have a lot of competing claims on their resources, and they'd have to choose between (for example) investing in new plants, new employee benefits, training, R&D or political speech. Which is likely to have a better long-term payoff? Hard to say, though it will vary from case to case. NGOs (and unions, too, though to a lesser extent) are by their nature single-purpose entities, created for the purpose of achieving certain policy objectives. They have far fewer competing claims on their attention. This decision really does free them up.
That may or may not be a good thing for the republic, but it's far from necessarily being a pro-right-wing approach. I think people here are "into" politics and they assume that lots of other people are into it the same way they are. Not so. Business people tend to be more interested in their businesses than in politics, and usually want to be left alone. The business people I don't care for are the opportunists, who line up for government goodies as if they were on welfare. Bah.
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