This is part of the Reuters series on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, handed down Jan. 21, 2010. After five years, is anything the same in U.S. elections? You can read other pieces in the series here.

Citizens United may have been just what the United States needed — a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court so dramatically wrongheaded that people across the country paid attention to it and said, “Hold on, something is wrong here.”

Though the actual ruling simply extended the flawed approach to campaign-finance laws that the court had been following for decades, Citizens United shined a light on the justices’ reasoning and demonstrated its shortcomings by taking that rationale to its logical — if absurd — conclusion.

The Supreme Court treats restrictions on both giving and spending money on elections as restrictions on “speech” under the First Amendment. While the case law has been dotted with victories for both advocates and opponents of campaign-finance restrictions over the past 40 years, it is vital to step back and look at the bigger picture.

In the seminal 1976 campaign-finance case, Buckley v. Valeo, the court laid out the line of reasoning relied on ever since. Buckley said that restrictions on giving and spending money in politics should be treated as if they are restrictions on speech.

This approach was not obvious or uncontroversial. Campaign-finance laws do not “prohibit” speech — using the word in its ordinary way. Rather, they restrict giving and spending money used on political speech. The decision to treat campaign-finance laws as restrictions on speech was based on the argument that money facilitates speech. “[V]irtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s society requires the expenditure of money,” the court argued.

Though that may be somewhat less true today — given the Internet — it is still largely correct.

What this rationale misses is that money facilitates speech not because there is any special connection between the two, but because money is useful stuff. It facilitates the exercise of many other constitutionally protected rights, as well as the fulfillment of many goals and interests.

Yet, and here’s the important part, no one — and especially not this Supreme Court — is likely to conclude that restrictions on spending money in connection with the exercise of all other rights would violate these rights. One has a right, for example, to procreative liberty — yet no right to buy a baby.

Money would help some people exercise these rights, too. But we don’t treat laws restricting baby selling as if they were restricting procreative liberty.

This comparison shows that the argument on which Buckley and Citizens United rest is inadequate. The fact that money facilitates speech is not sufficient to establish that restrictions on spending money ought to be viewed as restrictions on speech.

We should, of course, be careful about how we restrict campaign giving and spending. We must take care that laws don’t work to entrench incumbents, for example. But we cannot find a balanced solution to this difficult task by relying on a flawed argument or by making a slogan of a constitutional right.

Americans agree that they have a right to freedom of speech. But they disagree about whether laws limiting the ability of corporations to spend their shareholders’ money on political contributions is a restriction of that right.

Americans also agree that the U.S. government should not be up for sale. The court has repeatedly affirmed that laws restricting giving and spending money on politics are permissible when they prevent corruption. But they disagree about what corruption is and when such laws prevent it.

When a law restricts the amount of money that a wealthy person can spend on elections — like the cap on aggregate campaign contributions invalidated by the court last year — does the law violate the individual’s right to free speech? Or does it, legitimately, attempt to ensure that wealth doesn’t buy political influence?

These questions are not easy. Nor do they have obvious answers.

In the five years since the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United ruling, Americans have had the opportunity to see the effects of its defective reasoning and absence of common sense.

It is now painfully clear that elections depend substantially on money, and elected officials have to spend too much time raising money and respond disproportionately to the preferences of donors.

The silver lining of Citizens United may be that it is so clearly flawed that it will open the door, at last, to a more reasonable view of the relationship between money and speech.