A new Supreme Court decision promotes corporate rights at the expense of the rights of citizens. Changing the legal structure itself may be the best way to protect democracy.
Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—giving corporations the ability to spend money directly to influence federal elections under the Constitution’s First Amendment—was inevitable. It represents a logical expansion of corporate constitutional “rights”—which include the rights of persons which have been judicially conferred upon corporations. “Personhood” rights mean that corporations possess First Amendment rights to free speech, along with a litany of other rights that are secured to persons under the federal Bill of Rights.
The expansion of corporate rights and privileges under the law has been deliberate, beginning nearly two hundred years ago with the Dartmouth decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that private corporations had rights that municipal corporations—governments composed of “we the people”—did not.
[ ... ]
In some ways, the Citizens United ruling is merely part of a predetermined destiny set by a 1700s constitutional structure that placed greater priority on the rights of property and commerce than on the rights of people and nature. Reversing Citizens United means reversing that constitutional legacy.
~ more... ~
No comments:
Post a Comment