“Corporate political donations also grew rapidly; in 2000, business interests donated $1.2 billion to federally elected candidates, accounting for 75% of all political donations. With 20,000 lobbyists in Washington, corporations have become experts at getting their money’s worth in legislation and lax regulation in return for cash contributions.” The History of the Corporation By Lee Drutman
A classic example of the danger of national interests being trumped by corporate interests was the legislation to increase fuel-efficiency standards for energy conservation and reduction of dependence on foreign oil, introduced by Senators John Kerry and John McCain following 9/11. It is known that much of the money we spend on foreign oil goes to countries and organizations that threaten our safety and security. The bill lost 62 to 38-with the average no vote getting $18,000 in donations from auto companies and the average yes vote only $6,000.
In the current debates on health care reform and casino gambling who is dominating the debate, citizens or corporate interests? The time elected officials spend with corporate interests is time they are not available to meet and hear from citizens.
Corporations began as organizations that served the people and too often now the trend seems to be reversing.
Corporations are clearly not a “person” as defined by the 14th Amendment. They have no Constitutional Rights. They should be prohibited from all political activities including, political advertising, political donations or political lobbying.
…you never hear the Federalist Society and other “originalist” cite “corporate personhood” as a gross overreach by the courts. Clearly this century old concept is the poster child for overreach, yet the rightwing shows how intellectually corrupt they are in citing abortion, environmental and civil right cases as such examples.
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p>Everytime I have a debate with someone complaining about liberal judges, I ask them if they support striking down corporate personhood and they either can’t comprehend what I’m saying (how could a concept that protects capitialism be an overreach, they ask) or they stammer about how a company is a group of people who should have joint rights–or some other “interpetation” of the Constitution that makes no mention of this concept.
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p>Why the liberal talking heads never point out the conservatives embrace of this concept is beyond me.
The ‘personhood’ argument just isn’t a black and white thing, although I’ve seen it so characterized.
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p>A corporation is a person for some Federal income tax statutes, it’s not. There’s no equal protection argument with which I’m aware to conclude that individuals and corporation should be equally treated under the tax laws. i.e. the tax law that taxes white people more than black people is unconstitutional. The tax law that taxes corporations more than natural persons, is not.
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p>A corporation is not a “person” for Mass campaign contributions law. It’d can’t contribute; a person can.
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p>President has to be “natural born”. That excludes corporations from definition of person for that purpose.
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p>Court has held that 5th amendment only applies to ‘natural persons’.
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p>Those are simply examples I can think of off the top; I’m sure there are many, many other examples. When someone says that in the US, a corporation is treated as a person, my immediate thought is “for what purpose, or in what context”, because as a universal broad statement, it’s incorrect.
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p>The most common lament seems to be with respect to the 1st amendment, and frankly I think people are confusing the ‘right to speak’ with the ‘right to speak with equal volumn’, the latter being a right that doesn’t exist under the Constitution.
The first sentence is all F-ed up. A corporation is a person for some Federal income tax statutes, it’s not a person for many other sections within the tax code.
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p>That’s what we’re talking about here, I think.
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p> I wonder if you or David know about any court cases that have ruled on an attempt to limit lobbying activities by big corporations? I remember the famous tobacco settlement forcing tobacco companies to limit advertising……..but not lobbying.
By giving corporations equal rights under the 14th Amendment with “persons” who do not have equal volume they have the ability to obliterate the voices of real people.
This is from TedF below
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p>It’s the subject matter of the speech exacerbated by the great volume that concerns me too.
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p>And then when our side finally raises some real money to up the volume, we get told to “quiet down”. Health-Care Activists Targeting Democrats
Sniping Among Liberals May Jeopardize Votes Needed to Pass Bill
Judy, I don’t disagree with you about the importance of “volume.” But the volume of the speech is a function of money, not the ownership structure of the speaker. Bill Gates can generate some serious volume from his personal assets. My Corner Market In Roslindale, Inc., can’t. Does it make sense to base a decision on who has Due Process rights and who doesn’t by looking a corporate structure?
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p>TedF
and we started this discussion by me asking Sue (and David and now you) what suggestions they had for limiting/restricting the amount of money big and small for-profit and not-for-profit corporations could spend on lobbying. Is it the subject matter of lobbying or the volume?
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p>For instance many small corner markets in this state contribute small amounts (maybe $200) to small business organizations that spend maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars to lobby against everything from restricting tobacco sales by age and limiting in store advertising to opposing additional taxes on cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco(a proven way to reduce teen use of tobacco products). Too be sure, tobacco products are a very big piece of a small stores profit margin, as opposed to let’s say milk.
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p>They are in good company, I mean bad company, with the multiple trillion dollar tobacco industry that spends multiple hundred millions to protect their right to manufacture and market a product that even they admit makes people sick, but employs hundreds of thousands of people and underpins the economy of the rural south.
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p>So whaddya think? Small mom and pop neighborhood stores can lobby in support of their right to sell a product that makes people sick, but a multiple trillion dollar industry can’t?
Means tested speech. The absurdity of it is astounding! Eliminate the voice of GM, Exxon and at the same time, Red Cross, United Way. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc. … would their spending be limited under this ‘too rich to speak’ notion?
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p>Hopefully the plain language of the 1st amendment with it obvious and intentionaly broad scope still stands for something:
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p>
Well, Judy, since you asked! I think the fundamental problem of money in politics is not on the supply side but on the demand side. The best answer, which is really at odds with the current doctrine, unfortunately, is to limit campaign expenditures. This would solve the fundamental problem, since legislators would then be unable to use campaign contributions to buy votes.
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p>In principle, if we had a system of expenditure regulation, I would not favor any limits on lobbying.
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p>Sure, this is not going to happen, but remember, the question in this thread is whether corporations are “persons” under the Due Process Clause, and I don’t see the settled rule on that score changing, either!
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p>TedF
Here on an earlier post by Charlie:The elephants in the house (no, not the GOP)
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p>Exactly right.
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p>Want to think about that.
but the idea of paid lobbyists is off putting. It is illegal to pay for votes. Do we pay voters to sign petitions, nomination papers, attend a rally? Other than the fact we are more use to it, why is paying a politically connected mouthpiece more expectable. Every minute that elected officials spend with paid lobbyists representing moneyed interests, is a minute that is stolen from the constituents.
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p>Niki Tsongas is doing “Congress on Your Corner” where she makes herself available to listen to individuals from her district. This is the first time most constituents have ever had the chance to speak with their Congressional Representative. I’m going to guess the information she hears substantially differs from the filtered messages of paid corporate lobbyists.
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p>So what didn’t I consider?
Doing our best to speak with equal volume and what do we hear from our inside champions?
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p>From the Washington Post Sniping Among Liberals May Jeopardize Votes Needed to Pass Bill
A person’s right to speak as representative of a corporation would still be protected by the constitution even in the absence of such a patently absurd legal assertion as the court made back in 1885 or whenever. A corporation is no more a person than an automobile or a telephone cord is a person, and the fact that this precedent has survived for so long is an embarassment to the institution of the Supreme Court.
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p>So if you and I got together, and formed a corporation that operated, say, a restaurant. We used corporate funds
to put an ad in the margin of the BMG website, (as if we could even afford it!) that said “MEALS TAX WRONG. DEVAL’S A BIG POOPY PANTS”.
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p>Based on your comment, the resulting Mass Superior Ct case that compelled us to remove the ad should stand because a corporation posted it, and the corporation has no Freedom of Speech right.
http://www.youtube.com/view_pl…
I don’t think that the case held that corporations are “persons.” It held that corporate “persons” are entitled to the protections of the Due Process Clause just as natural persons. These are two different points, and one doesn’t necessarily follow from the other.
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p>I think it is sensible to give corporations rights under the DPC. Suppose Joe Smith opens a small shop as a sole proprietor, without incorporating, or suppose Joe Smith and his friend John Jones open the shop as a partnership. In either case, the business is not a separate legal entity from the owner, and so when the state deprives the business of its property without due process of law, Smith or Jones have a cause of action. For instance, the government must pay Smith & Jones the value of any property it takes by eminent domain.
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p>Suppose Smith and Jones decides instead to incorporate, and suppose the government takes property owed by Smith & Jones, Inc. Should it have to pay the corporation the value of the property? Of course (or so it seems to me). Or suppose Smith & Jones, as partners want to spend the profits earned in their business to lobby their representatives to change a law that is relevant to their business. Does it make any sense to allow them to do this if the business is unincorporated but not if it is incorporated? I don’t think so.
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p>Now, I should say that I’m not a strong supporter of commercial speech rights, which is what got Sue worked up in the first place. But I hold that view whether the speaker is a natural person or a juridical person such as a corporation. It is the subject matter of the speech, not the status of the speaker, that matters to me.
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p>TedF
stuff from a group of owners any more than it can from one owner, without just compensation. Fine- makes sense to me. But there’s no need to say that a group or organization “is a person”- though it is quite obviously a “group of people”, all of whom have rights and responsibilities.
is that it didn’t actually hold anything of the kind. The holding of the case is something about fences — there’s no hint of a constitutional issue. The “corporate personhood” issue arises entirely out of the syllabus, which reads in pertinent part:
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p>Now, is that accurate? We don’t really know, since obviously there’s no recording of the oral argument. What we do know is that the Reporter of Decisions at the time, J.C. Bancroft Davis, had served as the President of the Newburgh and New York Railroad some 20 years earlier, and of course the railroads were involved in a great deal of litigation at the time, including the Santa Clara County decision itself. That’s enough to make any conspiracy theorist awfully happy.
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p>There also appears to be some historical evidence that Davis’s summation is inaccurate at best, and that what C.J. Waite actually said was more along the lines that they would assume the constitutional issue without deciding it. There’s apparently a Vanderbilt Law Review article about this by one Howard Jay Graham. Citation appears to be 17 Vand. L. Rev. 525 (1964). Anyone got free Westlaw access?
This kind of thing is not that uncommon–I just read an article demonstrating that the court in Shelley’s case did not actually base its decision on what we know as the “Rule in Shelley’s Case.” I’m sure that the history behind the Supreme Court’s decision, the role of Davis, etc. are interesting, but really, isn’t the “holding” of the case now well-established, whether or not it really was the holding of the case? And so isn’t the question whether the rule is substantively justified?
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p>TedF
as far as I know, Santa Clara is the only US Supreme Court case whose significance lies solely in its syllabus. And, as far as I know, there’s no other important legal issue that has been “decided,” yet never actually addressed, by the Court. It’s just very strange. So absent further evidence, I would respectfully disagree with you that, at least in American jurisprudence, this kind of thing is “not that uncommon.”
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p>As for the real question being whether the rule is justified, by all means, let’s treat the issue as an open question. Let’s have the Court decide it on its merits, rather than pretending that it is established precedent and subject to the usual rules of stare decisis.
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p>Who wants to bring the test case? 😉
have been initiated by the corporations, therefore decisions have pretty much increased their rights in areas that give them a competitive financial advantage.
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p>Who would bring such a challenge?
I just want to emphasize that corporate personhood is not some newfangled idea that nineteenth-century capitalists foisted on the unsuspecting populace. It has a long history in civil law and common law. You can read about it in Blackstone’s commentaries, Book 1, Chapter 18. Here is a link to a poorly-formatted)version.
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p>Now, the notion that a corporation is also a “person” for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment may indeed have been new in the 1880s. But that’s trivial, because the Fourteenth Amendment itself was new in the 1880s. In the San Mateo case, Justice Field pointed out that the Fifth Amendment, which is older and which contains a Due Process clause, too, had long been assumed to protect corporations. And I think you could look at cases like Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518 (1819), to show that corporations, as corporations, had long been held to have constitutional rights of one sort or another, though the case arose under the Contract Clause rather than the Fifth Amendment.
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p>TedF
Anheuser-Busch? She won’t leave me alone.