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Corporate Personhood: First Amendment Rights

Supreme Court OKs unlimited corporate spending on elections

Reporting from Washington - Overturning a century-old restriction, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corporations could spend as much as they wanted to sway voters in federal elections.

In a landmark 5-4 decision, the court's conservative bloc said that corporations had the same right to free speech as individuals, and for that reason the government could not stop corporations from spending to help their favored candidates.

The ruling, which will presumably apply as well to labor unions and other organizations, is likely to have an effect on this year's congressional elections. Many political analysts and election-law experts predict that millions of extra dollars will flood into this fall's contests, much of it benefiting Republican candidates.

Republicans praised the decision as a victory for wide-open political speech, but Democrats slammed it as a win for big money.

President Obama called the ruling "a major victory for Big Oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans." He promised to seek "a forceful response to this decision" from Congress. Some Democrats talked about seeking legislation that would require corporations to get approval from their shareholders before spending money on politics.
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Until Thursday, corporations and unions were barred from spending their treasury funds on broadcast ads, campaign workers or billboards that urge the election or defeat of a federal candidate.

The restriction dates to 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded Congress to forbid corporations, railroads and national banks from putting money into federal races. After World War II, Congress extended the ban to labor unions. More recently, the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002 added an extra limit on corporate and union-funded broadcast ads in the month before an election. Such ads were prohibited if they even mentioned a candidate running for office.

Thursday's decision swept away all of these restrictions.

"The government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker's corporate identity," said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion. While the case of Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission dealt only with corporations, the ruling will probably also free unions to spend as they wish.

Two significant prohibitions were left standing. Corporations and unions cannot give money directly to the campaigns of federal candidates, or to political parties. And the court affirmed the requirement that sponsors of political ads disclose who paid for them. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on these points.

Thursday's decision was supported by five justices who were Republican nominees: Kennedy and Thomas along with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The dissenters included the three Democratic appointees: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. They joined a 90-page dissenting opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who was appointed by President Ford, a Republican. Stevens, who will turn 90 in April, spoke in a halting voice as he read part of his dissent in the courtroom Thursday.

He called the decision "a radical change in the law." He predicted that the ruling would "cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress and the states to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process."

The decision displayed a deep division of opinion on the court about the meaning of the 1st Amendment and the freedom of speech.
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Stevens and the dissenters said that the majority was ignoring the long-understood rule that the government could limit election money from corporations, unions and others, such as foreign governments.

"Under today's decision, multinational corporations controlled by foreign governments" would have the same rights as Americans to spend money to tilt U.S. elections, Stevens said.
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When his(this) case first reached the Supreme Court, the conservative justices voiced alarm that the government could restrict a movie, or perhaps a book, that criticized a candidate simply because it was paid for with corporate money. In September, they heard the case for a second time to broadly consider the issue of corporate-funded election ads.

Chief Justice Roberts said he was convinced that a broad free-speech ruling was required. Otherwise, it "would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern."

I have so many issues with this that it felt like someone kicked me in the chest. Watching this move through the system was worrisome. This decision has only further solidified the fascist take over of our republic.

I wrote about corporate personhood last year during Sotomayor's admission into the court. She is very much questioning not just first amendment rights but giving any constitutional rights to corporations.

Once again, the strict constructionist conservative wing of the Supreme Court threw out their ideals and voted to further corporate power and it's take-over of our government. It's *($%^ infectious. It's growing and they have bastardized the US Constitution again.

This is how the strict constructionists strayed to lands beyond from their ideals. Strict Constructionists

"Strict constructionism" is also used in American political discourse as an umbrella term for conservative legal philosophies such as originalism and textualism, which emphasize judicial restraint and fidelity to the original meaning (or originally intended meaning) of constitutions and laws.

The original intent of the constitution nor the 14th Amendment never even considered corporations as actual people. If they had intended Corporations to have the same constitutional rights as individuals they would have written "People and Corporations" throughout the document. In fact, before corporations had personhood, they needed a charter for organization which needed to be continually renewed by each state. That is the original intent of the Constitution.

There are a few arguments for it:

• Investor protection
• Management protection

There are so many arguments against it:

• They have a LOT money, translating into more and more effective speech for corporations
• They enjoy more rights in the form of lower tax rates and then just on profit. This is like taxing Caucasians 20% and everyone else 25%. Secondly, imagine if actual people were only taxed on what we "save" because all living costs were tax deductible? Also, imagine states fighting for your citizenship by giving you incentives like no state taxes for 10 years? These corporate "people" have preferential laws.
• It is a form of double representation. The investors are already represented as themselves. They vote and can put their own money towards a campaign. If you invest in a company but want another canditate to win other than what is being supported by the corporation, then the corporation is not accurately representing you.
• Corporations make false claims and representations. They use their First Amendment Rights to do great harm to the people. A great example of this is the Tobacco and Cigarette Industry claiming that smoking was safe and funding skewed studies.
• Financial Ratings companies like Standard & Poor and Moody say that their financial ratings are opinion and protected by the First Amendment. So, when they rated toxic assets as AAA they had no liability to their word even though the entire financial industry depends on these ratings accuracy. Giving them accountability may actually force them to give securities proper ratings.
• The Constitution cannot be cherry-picked. A real person cannot only have some right in the constitution. A person MUST have all rights. The problem is that corporations are slaves and cannot vote, to name two important conflicts with corporations having the full rights of the constitution.
• A corporation legally must maximize shareholder value. This is the highest law to the corporation and can even be sued by shareholders if found to not be doing this. These include things that could be "to the detriment of people." Corporations do not have the same priorities as actual people who exist in reality. Two or three times a day, we eat. Without sufficient food we die. Corporations don't have these daily existential crises

Solutions:

• Force the court to explain why corporations don't have full First Amendment Rights as people do. Corporations are "artificial people" after all. Justice Clarence Thomas had the clarity to at least do away with this contradiction.
• Force the court to tell us how corporations are not slaves.
• Force the court to tell us how corporations will participate in voting during an election.
• Force the court to tell us how a corporation can use a firearm without any other person helping.
• Force the court to tell us how a corporation can be conscripted into a war if we re-instate the draft.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations younger than 21 can possess alcohol.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations don't have identification cards like passports or driver licenses.
• Force the court to tell us how to imprison a corporation in a jail.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations owned by foreign entities, including foreign governments, can have rights under our constitution.

Any answers to these questions are purely rationalizations.

I don't believe any of this can be done because a corporation by itself cannot think, learn, or feel. It cannot be thrown in jail for the lack of physical presence. It cannot pull a lever in a voting booth nor mark any paper. A corporation does not need food or water. It doesn't even need toilet paper. It does not need to breath and cannot ever be hospitalized. A corporation never came out of a vagina (or c-section) nor must it eventually die. It cannot use a firearm. It is not conscious and can only act through proxies.

or we could just,
Remove corporate personhood. Singapore doesn't have corporate personhood and, while investment and growth is hampered, it still has a thriving economy where the risk of corporations is priced, truly, into its market value.

I'm not quite sure how corporate protection should look but we can cross that bridge when we get to it.

My last point is that this ruling clearly flies in the face of stare-decisis. This was an important aspect to confirming the Supreme Court Judges Alito and Roberts in the Judiciary Committee of Congress.