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Opinion of Kennedy, J.
urge the public to pay close attention to the candidate's platform on the featured issues. By banning broadcast in the very district where the candidate is standing for election, § 203 shields information at the heart of the First Amendment from precisely those citizens who most value the right to make a responsible judgment at the voting booth.
In defending against a facial attack on a statute with substantial overbreadth, it is no answer to say that corporations and unions may bring as-applied challenges on a case-by-case basis. When a statute is as out of bounds as § 203, our law simply does not force speakers to "undertake the considerable burden (and sometimes risk) of vindicating their rights through case-by-case litigation." Virginia v. Hicks, 539 U. S. 113, 119 (2003). If they instead "abstain from protected speech," they "har[m] not only themselves but society as a whole, which is deprived of an uninhibited marketplace of ideas." Ibid. Not the least of the ill effects of today's decision is that our overbreadth doctrine, once a bulwark of protection for free speech, has now been manipulated by the Court to become but a shadow of its former self.
In the end the Government and intervenor-defendants cannot dispute the looseness of the connection between § 203 and the Government's proffered interest in stemming corruption. At various points in their briefs, they drop all pretense that the electioneering ban bears a close relation to anticorruption purposes. Instead, they defend § 203 on the ground that the targeted ads "may influence," are "likely to influence," or "will in all likelihood have the effect of influencing" a federal election. See Brief for Appellee/Cross-Appellant FEC et al. in No. 02-1674 et al., pp. 14, 24, 84, 92-93, 94; Brief for Intervenor-Defendant Sen. John McCain et al. in No. 02-1674 et al., pp. 42-43. The mere fact that an ad may, in one fashion or another, influence an election is an insufficient reason for outlawing it. I should have thought influencing elections to be the whole point of political speech. Neither strict scrutiny nor any other standard
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