Cite as: 558 U. S. ____ (2010) 31 Opinion of the Court “In the realm of protected speech, the legislature is constitutionally disqualified from dictating the sub jects about which persons may speak and the speak ers who may address a public issue.” Id., at 784–785. It is important to note that the reasoning and holding of Bellotti did not rest on the existence of a viewpoint discriminatory statute. It rested on the principle that the Government lacks the power to ban corporations from speaking. Bellotti did not address the constitutionality of the State’s ban on corporate independent expenditures to support candidates. In our view, however, that restriction would have been unconstitutional under Bellotti’s central principle: that the First Amendment does not allow politi cal speech restrictions based on a speaker’s corporate identity. See ibid. 3 Thus the law stood until Austin. Austin “uph[eld] a direct restriction on the independent expenditure of funds for political speech for the first time in [this Court’s] his tory.” 494 U. S., at 695 (KENNEDY, J., dissenting). There, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce sought to use general treasury funds to run a newspaper ad supporting a spe cific candidate. Michigan law, however, prohibited corpo rate independent expenditures that supported or opposed any candidate for state office. A violation of the law was punishable as a felony. The Court sustained the speech prohibition. To bypass Buckley and Bellotti, the Austin Court identi fied a new governmental interest in limiting political speech: an antidistortion interest. Austin found a compel ling governmental interest in preventing “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s sup