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Corporations 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
by joubert 17y ago
Corporations 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.