In a 5-4 decision the United States Supreme Court has made bribing political candidates legal. Locally, when a developer is denied approval to build another subdivision, now corporate headquarters can turn around and fund the election of someone who will vote for it. Nationally, the awarding of federal contracts to campaign supporters will no longer go on under the table with risks of ethics violations and possible criminal charges, now it can be done out in the open.
The case at issue is Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205. This case involves a negative movie about Hilary Clinton that was released during the primaries. Citizens United, who produced the film, lost a case against the FEC which had prevented them from showing the film on a cable TV channel and from advertising the movie on TV. The lower court found that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws did apply to the movie. Although the case went to the Supreme Court on these narrow grounds, mainly whether the campaign finance laws were meant to apply to documentary-style movies, the Court took the unusual step of holding a second set of arguments to address whether two previous campaign finance law cases should be overruled. Although this case is sad for many reasons, I am especially sad that former-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was not able to guide the court to a more palatable result. Essentially, the majority threw out campaign finance laws and decided that the federal government can no longer ban corporations from spending money on political campaigns.
Justice Kennedy stated in the majority opinion: “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in free speech.” Hold on, Emily Litella, since when is a corporation an “association of citizens.” The last time I checked, they were state-chartered entities organized for the purpose of operating a business, making a profit, and sheltering the organizers of the business from personal liability. I don’t think anyone would mistake one for an “associations of citizens.” This decision is a travesty on a number of levels, but as I discussed with my classes today, corporations are not humans. Thomas Jefferson stated: “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, . . .” These rights are human rights, essential to our type of government. They should not be cheapened by their extension to corporations. (I do understand that corporations have been given “rights” over the years by the Supreme Court, starting with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. I just don’t agree with that line of decisions. And while I agree with Stevens’s Dissent in Citizens, I don’t agree with his adherence to the “corporations are people too” position.)
This case is not just about campaign finance laws; it is about the power that corporations have amassed over the years. Do you really want Xe Services, LLC, f/k/a Blackwater, choosing your next President? When my students ask me, why doesn’t anybody do anything about this stuff? I tell them, we are like frogs in a pot of water that has slowly been turned to boiling. The changes happen so gradually, that we don’t know we are cooked until it is too late. Let’s notice this change. Let’s do something about it.
i am glad for what you write here, am in agreement. Yes, “Let’s notice this change. Let’s do something about it.” Let’s prove this ol’ frog is not boiled yet. Here is a list, a tool for you and i and anyone who wants to do something, or even just understand this thing better:
A partial annotated list of links against corporate personhood
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=279729610824
please share, repost, and add.
Also, this list is looking for an organization to adopt it, place it on a website, and update it.
Cute list looking for a good home. Is potty trained. 😎
Let’s all remember that even though these big companies can give all this money to someone’s political campaign, it is still the American people that get to vote. The big companies don’t get to go to the ballots more just because they donated more.
The foreign policy implications are alarming. What’s to stop the U.S subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies from donating sufficient sums of money to advance the interests of the foreign country where the parent company is based? The proposition that this is possible should frighten everyone.
Kimberly, I am completely with you, and have been summarizing the legal arguments against corporate personhood and speech here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=corporation+speech
The root of the problem is that corporations are divorced from their owners, who have been given a grant of limited liability for the risks they shift to society, a cloak of anonymity by which they can behave irresponsibility and seek favors from government, as well as unlimited lives and deep pockets to make persistent efforts to corrupt.
They are not persons yet.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad is sometimes cited because the court reporter’s comments included a statement the Chief Justice made before oral arguments began, telling the attorneys during pre-trial that “the court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” Later opinions misinterpret these pre-argument comments as part of the legal decision. If you know anything about the SCOTUS, you’ll agree it is beyond strange that the court reporter even included this statement, until you learn that this particular court reporter was apparently the president of a railroad.
I’m not sure if you intended to be ironical or not. You cite the exact reason why corporations should not be involved with our government. There have been many cases since Santa Clara expanding corporation’s rights. Corporations may not be “persons,” they have been given human rights – this is the core of the objection to the decision in Citizens United.
Well, not really irony. You mentioned the Santa Clara case as the start of corporate personhood, without mentioning that it was sleight of hand and not a real ruling on the subject. That’s exactly what the clerk was counting on, and why it worked. Just thought I’d tell the rest of the story.
Actually, long before the Santa Clara case, the legal fiction of corporations as people was established to include five legal rights—the right to a common treasury or chest (including the right to own property), the right to a corporate seal (i.e., the right to make and sign contracts), the right to sue and be sued (to enforce contracts), the right to hire agents (employees) and the right to make by-laws (self-governance). They were given the rights they needed to do the only thing they were designed to do. Conduct business.
They are amoral, profits and self interest as highest priority are mandated by law to be part of their design, and they have limited liability. This gives them the “personality” of a sociopath, and makes them unsuited by design to using free speech responsibly.
With the current design, the only solution I can think of is to have Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” made part of all corporate charters.
By the way, now that money equals speech, we need a new word. “Free Speech” gives the wrong impression of what we are really talking about, don’t you think?
Lampie, the new word we need is “CorpSpeak”. See: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23CorpSpeak
This will go down in history as one of the one of the Supreme Court’s worst lapses of judgment. Not as shameful as, say, Plessey v. Ferguson, but still very, very misguided.
A Corporation IS an “association of citizens”– those citizens are the shareholders, i.e., owners of said corporation, who associate ever so often (annual meetings, and other special occasions)….
And as for objections to “corporate personhood”, as a person is created by human parents and grows in a mother’s womb, so too is a corporation. It is created by the (human) people who sign its original charter, and the “womb” that allows the corporation to be ‘born’ is that of the agency that grants corporate charters. The difference between the two different types of “births” are, in my opinion, negligible.
(Eventually, human embryos won’t have to be implanted into a person in order to be born– so the “birth from a human” objection will cease to have merit.)
As for Lampie’s argument that corporations have “the personality of a ‘sociopath’, (which) makes them unsuited by design to using free speech responsibly”, this argument that discriminates against REAL sociopaths (who as far as I know, STILL have their free speech rights unencumbered by the SCOTUS decision or any comments you’d make to the contrary). Sociopaths have rights, too!
Shawn, several points:
– while real people associate to form a corporation, a corporation remains a legal fiction created by governments, not the people “associating” with it. It is legal separate from them and their ownership right is considered property.
– Since a corporation is peoples’ property, those have Constitutional rights to make sure their property is not unjustly or without due process taken by government.
– Other forms of property, like human slaves, were not considered citizens and did not have Constitutional rights, including a right to speak. If slave and inanimate things can’t speak for Constitutional purposes, neither does it make any sense to argue that corporations -as opposed to the people in them, can “speak”
– Further, it is crystal-clear that the Founding Fathers hated corporations, and the ability of states to closely restrict them and to impose conditions on the privileges and rights they received was uncontested. It is a radical and profoundly non-originalistic step to conclude as the Roberts/Scalia court did that the Founding Fathers intended to provide Constitutional speech rights to corporations.
Shawn, presumably your comment is wholly tongue-in-cheek, but let me note that we hunt down and lock away (and even execute) sociopaths – thus depriving them not merely of their speech, but of their ability to harm us and even their existence in some cases.
If corporations are by nature sociopathic, then we by all means ought to do the same.
Note that we don’t need to lock up corporations; we can find various ways to change their nature, control their bad behavior and limit their ability to hurt us – the simplest way, of course, would be to simply eliminate the limited liability of their shareholders, who would then have every incentive to control what their little Frankensteins do.
Shawn,
I’ll continue your birth analogy, If that’s how you see it. At birth, a human baby has not learned speech. It is taught by the people who created it, who are liable for it’s actions and therefore have a vested interest in teaching it morals and responsibility. Even then, it’s rights are limited until it reaches an age generally accepted as old enough to have learned responsibility for it’s actions and speech.
The corporate “person”, on the other hand, does not have the capacity for morality, and is directed to externalize responsibility by it’s creators. They don’t have the problem of liability that human parents do.
So, how long does it take for the average corporation to become responsible, moral, and therefore ready to have rights?
Still waiting for the first one.
I guess they’re not old enough yet.
this is one of those rulings by the conservative court that will eventually be reversed because it is based on bad reasoning as well as bad law. it is easy to see how money can be equated with influence or access, but how it can be equated with speech is beyond me (unless of course you completely distort the english language, and dispense with rational thought). i wonder do these conservative justices really think that it was the intent of the founding fathers that the rich and powerful should have more (not just more but considerably more) right to influence government policy than the rest of us? these clowns have the nerve to criticize the reasoning behind the right to privacy that legitimizes the right to an abortion.