I should let this go because I am almost certain that I am misinterpreting Jason's point, so let's not make the response below in any way about Jason, but rather only about some of the words that I do not think convey what we in America are all about.
Lets imagine a landscape with a large group of people milling about. Those individuals might decide individually to remain radically independent of one another ["each a law unto himself"] or may choose to get into an organizational relationship --- a law-ordered society. Such societies may range from the minimalistically constrained [a radical libertarian democracy with almost no "government" and few laws] to increasing forms of moderated democracies, wherein rights and power still theoretically reside in the people, to forms of governance emphasizing entities other than the individual people, such as monarchy [The King], oligarchy [The high-born], socialism [the societal entity and its goals not necessarily honoring certain individual thrival], communism {dictionary style} [the community general good without individual economic differences], and a lot of other shades and compromises.
The United States is a democracy with quite a few compromises to ensure what our leaders have felt rightly or wrongly, from the Constitution on down, to be in the interest of the general well-being of the citizens. Freedom of Speech is firmly within this context of Democracy, and not of "socialism". In fact, since freedom of speech is oriented to the individual citizen and not to the society nor government nor corporation, it is in fact antithetical to concepts other than democracy.
But the United States is a limited democracy, which does care about the general good and so one cannot in principle exercise any Constitutional right to the detriment of other citizens. Therefore having freedom of speech is like all other freedoms bound by the requirement that when using it you cannot limit your fellow citizens' rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". Since actions will inevitably conflict, the larger society must have means to maintain order [police] and to render judgement and restitution [the legal system]. In a Libertarian Democracy, this would probably be settled rather by mobs and lynchings and whoever had the strongest right cross.
By far the most controversial court decision of the 20th century was when it was decided to give corporate entities the legal standing of "people". Whether one agrees with that decision or not, it radically tilted the playing field in matters where corporations came into conflict with actual individuals, who could not match their economic base and what that base could do to influence court decisions and policy.
The Constitutional framers did not desire for money to be playing a major role in controlling the legal system for reasons that any political historian and philosopher regards as obvious. To maintain their concept of a limited democracy, while striving to honor individual rights [such as free speech] as much as possible, the court system needs to be as "democratically" [i.e. flat playing field; for rich or poor] oriented/based as possible. Allowing corporations to be defined as citizens could theoretically have been coherent with such a goal, but given what we really know about real world function, it is not.
