Reviews:
 ·Mediacom
·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to franknalco
Re: A Failure to Amend I think it's important to understand the legal basis for the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC. Rather than trying to summarize the legal concept of corporate personhood here, I suggest you read at least the first 2 sections of the very good Wikipedia article.
It frankly makes someone look totally uninformed when they exclaim, "OMG! The Supreme Court just declared in 2010 that corporations are people! That's ridiculous, and unconstitituional! Let's amend the Constitution!"
The corporate person is a legal construct that has been a well understood precedent in our legal system for over 200 years. There is nothing in the Constitution about corporations. Nor is anyone (much less the Supreme Court) declaring that "corporations are people". Obviously, a corporation and a living person are two different things.
Furthermore, the corporate person legal construct has many aspects that no one would want to take away. For example, why can you sue a corporation? Because they are a legal entity called a "corporate person".
So if you were going to amend the Constitution around corporate contributions, you can't just say "Corporations are not people". That literally makes no sense. You'd have to say "Corporate persons have the following rights and duties under the Constitution, EXCEPT that they are not allowed to contribute to political campaigns."
I really wish people would understand the reality of this rather than the narrative that's put out there.
You have to follow the money to understand this one. And it's big, big money we're talking about.
The whole argument is really a cover for the political fact that Democrats want to have the upper hand in the money stream that flows into politics. They get the vast majority of union contributions today (and notice no one is screaming "Unions are not people!"). They get the majority of individual contributions. They only get about a 50-50 split of corporate contributions. That's not good enough for them.
So, they come up with this (in reality ridiculous) narrative that tries to short cut the whole thing by saying "Hey people! Get riled up! Corporations are not people!"
Logically, if you are going to ban corporate contributions, you should also ban union contributions, not to mention union "voter education" and "get out the vote" campaigns, which BTW are actually about 2x what unions spend on direct contributions. |
