In response to this post, Wendy Kaminer sends along the following response (reprinted with permission):

To answer your rhetorical question (which seems silly, I know:) I am not related to either Floyd or Dan Abrams; I’m not even acquainted with either, except by reputation. And, I’ve been writing about the NYTimes’ inaccurate or misleading characterizations of Citizens United for about a year (here in this February, 2011 post:  and more recently, here).

To answer the actual question: “Why the pushback against whether super-PAC’s [were] created by Citizens United?” At least for me, the answer is not “to defend the Supreme Court …”  While I have been critical of campaign finance laws and have defended the Citizens United ruling, I consider its scope and reasoning matters about which reasonable people may differ (and while I think the Court reached essentially the right result, at the very least with regard to Hillary movie, I don’t assume the majority reached the right result for the right reasons and feel no need to defend it.)  I’m preoccupied with the press response and the tendency to demonize Citizens United to make it the root of all campaign finance evil mainly because it dumbs down the public debate and encourages what I consider a really dumb and dangerous “solution” to the problem of campaign finance —  a constitutional amendment declaring corporations aren’t people (which I’ve criticized here, in 2010).

I understand your argument that Citizens United can fairly be said to have led to the billionaire funded Super-PAC’s; but your’s is an informed and informative explanation – unlike hit and run references in the press to Citizens United and the Super-PAC’s, which are a lot less informative than misleading (and perhaps stubbornly, self-servingly so.) The shorthand descriptions of Citizens United rendered in news reports and editorials stating without explanation that Citizens United led to or paved the way for the Super-PAC’s signal to readers — intelligent, literate readers — that Citizens United directly addressed the rights of individual super donors, and if only it could be reversed or repealed, all would be well, or at least much better, and billionaires would no longer be able to exert undue influence on elections.  As you know better than most people, campaign finance reform (and the current mess) is a lot more complicated than that.

Regards,
Wendy Kaminer