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This doesn't seem to me to have any merit, either legally or from common sense. Corporations have no rights under the Constitution? Oh, so can the FBI raid th
by mquander 17y ago
This doesn't seem to me to have any merit, either legally or from common sense. Corporations have no rights under the Constitution? Oh, so can the FBI raid the offices of any corporation without a warrant? Could Congress pass a law prohibiting CNN from covering a war? Obviously, the Constitution should prohibit these things, and it does.
The reason the court did not elaborate on its classification of corporations as "speakers" in the context of the First Amendment is that it's settled law, with a long history you could look up on Wikipedia, and none of the justices (even the dissenting ones) disagree with that classification. The dissent of the minority was based on the idea that even though corporations should enjoy a strong right to free political speech, the state's interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption is great enough that it should be restricted in this case.
Addendum: No, I don't think this is a really good situation, although I doubt that the sky will fall; corporations already find ways to shovel about as much money as they might like at candidates. However, I think that it's just a consequence of two root problems -- the first being the great inequality of wealth (and therefore power) in our society, being nearly all concentrated in a rich elite; the second being the lack of serious and/or compulsory public financing for campaigns, so that wealth is usually a prerequisite to being elected.
- joubert 17y agoCorporations are not citizens. This means that technically they cannot cast a vote in an election. But it also means that in practice the power they can exert to effect certain political outcomes must be constrained (otherwise votes of citizens will become even more meaningless because of the asymmetry of capital concentration). You say "although I doubt that the sky will fall; corporations already find ways to shovel about as much money as they might like at candidates". Surely they were not actually able to push unlimited amounts of money to influence political outcomes, otherwise there would have been no reason for the Supreme Court to make the change. Or no?
- mquander 17y agoWell, what I meant specifically is that corporations can influence elections indirectly via PACs and 527s, and that corporations can attempt to influence elected candidates via lobbying (and by actually getting their representatives into positions of power) so they already have some reasonably effective mechanisms for converting their money to votes. I don't think that the Supreme Court decision to enable them to spend directly on candidates really took into account very much these existing abilities one way or the other, although I'm not a lawyer and I probably haven't studied it much more than you, so maybe I'm missing some chain of reasoning.
- blasdel 17y ago> Obviously, the Constitution should prohibit these things, and it does. Yes, the first is 'unreasonable search and seizure', the second is a 'bill of attainder', both things Congress is explicitly prohibited from enacting. But the constitution doesn't establish a means for Congress to handle the creation of corporations: that's completely delegated to the states. While Congress can regulate their interstate actions (as if they were people), corporations don't really exist at a federal level. In early independent america they didn't exist at all.
- jacobolus 17y agoAlso, as the liberal justices have clearly explained in several dissents to Kennedy-written opinions about campaign finance over the last few years, money cannot be equated with speech, and restricting campaign finance can be seen in many ways to increase people’s ability to participate in the political process, as guaranteed by the constitution.