16 CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N Opinion of STEVENS, J. United looks so much like the MCFL organizations we have exempted from regulation, while a feature-length video-on-demand film looks so unlike the types of electoral advocacy Congress has found deserving of regulation, this challenge is a substantial one. As the appellant’s own arguments show, the Court could have easily limited the breadth of its constitutional holding had it declined to adopt the novel notion that speakers and speech acts must always be treated identically—and always spared expendi­ tures restrictions—in the political realm. Yet the Court nonetheless turns its back on the as-applied review proc­ ess that has been a staple of campaign finance litigation since Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1 (1976) (per curiam), and that was affirmed and expanded just two Terms ago in WRTL, 551 U. S. 449. This brief tour of alternative grounds on which the case could have been decided is not meant to show that any of these grounds is ideal, though each is perfectly “valid,” ante, at 12 (majority opinion).16 It is meant to show that there were principled, narrower paths that a Court that was serious about judicial restraint could have taken. There was also the straightforward path: applying Austin and McConnell, just as the District Court did in holding —————— 16 THE CHIEF JUSTICE finds our discussion of these narrower solutions “quite perplexing” because we suggest that the Court should “latch on to one of them in order to avoid reaching the broader constitutional question,” without doing the same ourselves. Ante, at 3. There is nothing perplexing about the matter, because we are not similarly situated to our colleagues in the majority. We do not share their view of the First Amendment. Our reading of the Constitution would not lead us to strike down any statutes or overturn any precedents in this case, and we therefore have no occasion to practice constitutional avoidance or to vindicate Citizens United’s as-applied challenge. Each of the arguments made above is surely at least as strong as the statu­ tory argument the Court accepted in last year’s Voting Rights Act case, Northwest Austin Municipal Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U. S. __ (2009).