ARI SHAPIRO, Host:
Let's follow up, now, on a dramatic moment from this week's State of the Union address. President Obama criticized a recent Supreme Court ruling. One of the justices in the audience, Samuel Alito, was visibly annoyed. The two men disagree over what role corporations, including foreign ones, will now play in elections.
NPR's Peter Overby reports.
PETER OVERBY: In the long run, the prospect of corporate politicking is bad news for Democrats. But in the here and now, they're using the Citizens United case to rally their base. That was the context as President Obama came to that section of the speech.
BARACK OBAMA: With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.
OVERBY: Justice Alito sat with five other justices in front of some democratic lawmakers. As the president hit the line, including foreign corporations, the Democrats all started a standing ovation. Alito shook his head and seemed to say, not true.
Alito was one of the five conservatives in the majority on Citizens United. It's not clear if he spoke out loud. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was sitting beside him. She gave no sign that she heard what he said.
Yesterday, MoveOn.org said that 10,000 of its members rated that passage of the speech their second favorite, and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy gave a floor speech on Citizens United.
PATRICK LEAHY: And the Chinese come in and decide and affect American elections. It's hard to envision that this is what the founding fathers meant to enshrine in the Constitution.
OVERBY: There's already a law against foreign money in American politics, and the justices didn't touch it in Citizens United. And yet...
FRED WERTHEIMER: They have opened a loophole here that did not exist prior to the decision.
OVERBY: That's Fred Wertheimer of the group Democracy 21. He and other advocates of regulating political money say that foreign investors can get into American politics by buying into American companies. Their analysis says the legal language preventing such political activity exists only in the enforcement regulations, and without language specifically in the statute itself, Wertheimer says that even the sovereign funds of other countries' governments could invest here and start playing politics.
WERTHEIMER: That's the worst case scenario and that door is open now, by this decision.
OVERBY: But it doesn't look that way to some of Washington's top campaign finance lawyers. Robert Lenhard is a former Democratic chairman of the Federal Election Commission. He says if there's a legal loophole now, it was always there.
ROBERT LENHARD: What Citizens United has done has created the potential that the volume of money that could travel through these rivers could grow.
OVERBY: Ken Gross mainly represents corporations. He says the critics have simply misread Citizens United.
KEN GROSS: That is not what this case says and the law prohibiting foreign involvement stands untouched.
OVERBY: But whatever legal limits are untouched or carved with loopholes, Democrats on Capitol Hill are drafting legislation to fix them.
Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.