Why the ire over Citizens United?

I agree with Sam's post about the Toobin story on Citizens United--it does seem like much ado about nothing. My own theory about the internal dynamics at work considers the history of individual justices, namely Justice Kennedy. Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the case Citizens United overturned, was decided in 1990, during Justice Kennedy's first full term on the Court, and Kennedy wrote the principal dissent (joined by O'Connor and Scalia). He likely had been itching to overturn that case since 1990 and the change of personnel and passage of time gave him the votes (save the Chief, at the outset) to finally do it.

Now, a different issue: In a comment to Sam's post, Orin Kerr says:

I suspect Toobin's article is getting a lot of favorable attention because a lot of his audience starts off with the belief that Citizens United is an evil ruling that the conservatives foisted on the American people on behalf of big corporations. The decision is so evil, the thinking runs, that how it came about is not unlikely to involve a devious machination.

Why is so much ire aimed directly and uniquely at Citizens United, out of the entire body of campaign finance law? Why is this case perceived as the alpha and omega of bad law on the subject? Yes, Citizens United overturned Austin. But Austin was 20 years at this point, so it was hardly Justice Brandeis in Erie overturning Swift. And Austin itself was arguably the First Amendment anomaly--the one and (at that point) only time the Court had accepted the equality rationale for regulating campaign spending (although it was equality in the guise of corruption). Austin could not be reconciled with Bellotti v. Bank of Boston in 1980, which invalidated a ban on corporate expenditures in an issue election, or, more fundamentally, with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. So why pick on Citizens rather than these earlier precedents, especially Buckley, which is the case that introduced the fundamental idea that expending money for expression is First-Amendment protected?

Some of it is that the Court had to overturn precedent, but again, this was not a particularly venerable precedent and it was only one in a broader body of case law.  Some of it is the process--relisting, ordering new briefing, etc. And Toobin's narrative supports this explanation. But, as Sam points out with respect to McLean Credit, this is not so unusual. Some--and I suspect a lot--of it is recency bias--the most recent case is the most important case and the one to praise or criticize, depending on your viewpoint. That Citizens United is grounded in prior case law ceases to be the issue; it is all about the newest case.

I actually noticed something similar in discussions of Garcetti v. Ceballos, which held that a public employee enjoys no First Amendment protection for expression that is part of his job function. There were immediate fears for the effect of Garcetti on academic scholarship; since academics were speaking or writing as part of their jobs, their speach was unprotected. But it's not as if pre-Garcetti doctrine--which accorded no protection to employee speech that was not on a matter of public concern and spoken as a citzen--was particularly protective of employee expression;an English professor fired for an article on Jane Austen likely would not have been protected even without Garcetti.