Well. First of all, "people" don't lose their rights when they organize as a corporation. They still, as individuals, have the same rights they had, as individ

Well. First of all, "people" don't lose their rights when they organize as a corporation. They still, as individuals, have the same rights they had, as individuals, prior to forming the corporation. Forming the corporation then creates a legal entity which has, and which passes on to them, certain additional privileges that individuals do not typically have. For example, they gain strong protection from personal liability. And it has long been recognized that, in order for corporations to work and to be useful -- and they are certainly useful for some purposes -- the privileges extended to this legal entity must resemble, in some ways, the rights afforded to individual persons. For example, a corporation needs to be able to enter into contracts, a corporation needs to be able to file suit, etc. The tricky question is: which specific set of privileges should be extended? In other words, what is the minimum we must do in order for the corporation to be useful? And this is not idle when it comes to questions of speech. An argument can be made that granting corporations the "right" to engage in political speech grants no right at all -- rather, it rigidly constrains what the corporation can do, since now arguments can be made about whether support for this candidate or that ballot issue best fulfills the corporation's duty to its investors. Do you really want to have directors sued because they directed the corporation to "speak" for a candidate who later enacted regulations that reduced the value of the shareholders' investment, for example? Articulating a clear line, which allows corporations to do what they need to do for business to work, but which doesn't go further than that, and which doesn't lead to absurdities like a corporation being forced to "speak" for a particular candidate in order to fulfill its duties, is hard.