With today being the last day of the current session of the U.S. Supreme Court, the expectation was that there would be a decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

This is the case about a documentary totally critical of Hillary Clinton (Hillary: The Movie) that was made by a conservative group and shown last year during her presidential bid, and whether it should be regulated as if it were a campaign ad or expenditure. The group, Citizens United, wanted to make the movie available to cable TV viewers without having to comply with federal campaign finance laws. The Federal Election Commission, among others, insisted that it had to do so.

As it turned out, the court failed to reach a decision and instead said it would hear arguments about the case once again, in a special session of the court on Sept. 9.

NPR's Peter Overby reports that while the court had been expected to address whether such funding for the movie "should be allowed and secretive," instead, the justices "zeroed in on a question that didn't even come up in the oral arguments":

Whether to overturn a 23-year-old decision that controls corporate political money more broadly. In that case, the court said in 1986 that corporate money cannot be used for independent campaign ads. It's been reaffirmed as recently as 2003.

Here are some more details about the case from the Cornell University Law School.

Tags: Approaching the Bench