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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCorporate Personhood Is Not the Problem with Citizens United
http://www.alternet.org/story/155033/corporate_personhood_is_not_the_problem_with_citizens_united_/_640x425_310x220
American politics is in trouble. A tsunami of unaccountable, untraceable political money is overwhelming the Republican race for the presidential nomination and threatens to do the same to the fall election. For many people, especially progressives, the culprit is easy to name: the Supreme Courts 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which swept away any limits on election-advocacy ads by corporations, unions and independent political-action committees (PACs) and issue groups.
Many progressives believe that Citizens United made corporations people and that a constitutional amendment restricting corporate personhood will cure this political ill. Citizens United is a bad decision. This obvious fact may even be dawning on the Courts conservative majority, which is taking a surprisingly leisurely look at American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock, in which the Montana Supreme Court directly challenged Citizens United, in essence telling the justices that they didnt understand the first thing about politics. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissenters in Citizens United, have publicly stated that American Tradition may offer an opening to limit or even overturn the malign precedent.
But the problem didnt start with Citizens United and cant be fixed by a corporate-personhood amendment. The threat to American self-government runs far deeper. It started nearly 40 years ago, when the Court first became involved in campaign-finance cases. Four decades of decisions have allowed the rich and powerful to transform free speechour most important tool of bottom-up self-governmentinto a means of top-down social control.
To understand whats wrong with free-speech doctrine in the 21st century, consider a question put from the bench by Chief Justice John Roberts during oral argument in a case called Arizona Free Enterprise Clubs Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett.
CanonRay
(14,113 posts)to fixing what is wrong in this country. While I agree it is not the whole problem, it is the underlying basis for many of them. Plus, it is an easy issue for low info people to understand. Are corporations people? Of couse not, says your common sense. This is where we have to begin. You cannot begin to tackle everything wrong in this country at one time. Focus on one big, winnable issue, and that is corporate personhood.
Romulox
(25,960 posts)But the attack on corporate personhood reflects both a misconception of Citizens United and the problem with current First Amendment law. The problem is not that corporations are persons under the law. Corporations have always been personsthat is and always has been, in fact, the definition of a corporation, a fictive person able to own property and enter into legal agreements. Also, the problem is not the idea that corporate persons have free-speech rights. Of course they do. The idea that corporations have some of the free-speech rights that people have is essential to important Court decisions like New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) and New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), which removed the threat of government censorship from American media. Nor is the problem the idea that money is speech -- the First Amendment would be toothless if government could prohibit anyone from paying to publish thoughts or being paid to publish them.
This is weak evidence to support that headline.
Why is the attack on Corporate Personhood a misguided? That's the question the headline promised to answer, but didn't. I don't consider "they always have," and "of course they do!" to be Constitutional arguments.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)and the strange behavior of the supremes -- roberts in particular.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)If the Constitution were to be amended so that The New York Times Company is not a person, then the state of Alabama would be free to pass laws that made it effectively impossible for the Times to publish any criticism of racist government officials.
Furthermore, even aside from incorporation of the Bill of Rights so as to restrict the states, the federal government itself is bound by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which uses the same language ("any person" . If a corporation were not a person, then, in 2017, President Palin would be free to issue an executive order confiscating the property of any corporation that had displeased her (The New York Times Company, the Sierra Club, Democratic Underground, LLC). If that were to happen under current constitutional law, the corporation's attorneys would run to court and get the confiscation reversed, probably with an award of attorney's fees because the illegality would be so obvious in light of the Due Process Clause. With an anti-personhood amendment in place, however, Attorney General Taitz would appear in court in support of the government. She would point out that the Due Process Clause protects only a "person" and that the executive order did not take property from any person, only from a corporation.
Romulox
(25,960 posts)A "precedent" is a case that is binding rule of law derived from a case that is "on point" (meaning the facts are largely analagous) to a present case, such that the rule in the first case provides a clear guiding rule in the second case.
"Precedent" doesn't mean something that logically "must" follow from a previous precedent. So, the following is an argument, not a "precedent": ("If the Constitution were to be amended so that The New York Times Company is not a person, then the state of Alabama would be free to pass laws that made it effectively impossible for the Times to publish any criticism of racist government officials."
The rest of your argument is called a "litany of horrors". Again, it does not refer to any "precedent". There is a reason these sorts of arguments are NOT being made to the SCOTUS!
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)If the Constitution is amended to eliminate corporate personhood (with the wording that I've seen proposed), then numerous past precedents would be overturned. Many of those precedents, like Times v. Sullivan, are good ones that should be kept.
The serious inquiry should be how to overturn the bad precedent of Citizens United without opening the door to widespread abuse. My argument is that one commonly supported amendment would go way too far and would give state and federal officials extraordinary power to stifle criticism and to play favorites. Your only response is to call that a "litany of horrors" but without explaining why this dire prediction is false (in fact, without even clearly stating that you think it is false).
My opinion is that spending money for a political ad has elements of speech but also elements of conduct. The trick is to impose reasonable regulations on the latter without unduly infringing on the former.
mmonk
(52,589 posts)could not really be made.
mythology
(9,527 posts)when the go to PACs. If a corporation could only donate the 5,000 dollar maximum that can be given to an individual politician, split between the primary and general election, they would have a far lower influence then they can now. But look at Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum who both kept their campaigns going based on billionaire donors to their PACs or at how much the Koch brothers are pledging.
Merely taking away corporate citizenship, which allows for groups of individuals to band together in a business relationship or bring in investors, wouldn't solve the issue of unlimited PAC donations.
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)corporate personhood people. Not one. Period.
The author's initial premise is just wrong.
shanen
(349 posts)Looking for discussions of these topics, but they don't seem to be very active here... This is an old one, but it is most to the point.
My current take (as described in more detail in the thread referenced in the URL) is that we should push for a Constitutional Amendment to put human rights above corporate rights. This may not seem like the most direct response to the problem, but I think it would suffice as a basis to say that corporations should never have GREATER rights than human beings, which is clearly the case now.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/125137926