Constitutional status of a corporation (Politico)

We seem to be channeling the Gilded Age.

Gilded Age courts ruled that corporations were persons. The Supreme Court ? in its 2010 decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission ? gave corporations the right of freedom of speech, which we once naively considered an attribute of people.

Continue Reading

As far as rights to free speech go, having a mouthpiece is now as good as having a mouth. Rather than just equating speech with money and giving corporate persons human rights, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney cut to the chase. Corporations, he declared, are people. This position, too, is a Gilded Age legacy.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street protesters rally against corporations as a danger to the rights of citizens and to democracy itself. Nothing could be more Gilded Age.

Romney received his fair share of abuse for saying corporations are people, but he actually reprised the logic of some 19th-century state legislatures, which were seeking to enforce corporate responsibility by allowing debtors to go after shareholders and owners ? people ? to retrieve the money owed them by corporate persons.

As with so many things, Romney wants it both ways. He conflates people and persons in a way Gilded Age citizens protested and Gilded Age courts enabled.

Romney, even if unintentionally, has returned us to a fundamental debate of the Gilded Age: What is the constitutional status of a corporation?

The tendentious reasoning of the Supreme Court?s majority in Citizens United has made clear how far the court will push corporate personhood ? and much is at stake in the justices? doing so. How we hold elections is a major test of a democracy; Citizens United has now granted corporations a large say in how we do this.

The Supreme Court of the Gilded Age created the conundrum of corporate personhood. But it ruled in a manner so sloppy, and with such an appearance of corruption and self-dealing, that the original decision appears a bad seed ? and Citizens United its bitter fruit. The Roberts court is unlikely to revisit a decision that is now established law ? but that is no reason for the rest of us to ignore it or its consequences.

The Wall Street protesters are people upset about the conflation of corporate rights with the civil rights of citizens. They are not the first. History matters in this.

Like so many things, corporate personhood represents the corruption of our best intentions.

Congress passed and the states enacted the Constitution?s 14th Amendment to protect the civil rights of former slaves ? and in time, it did. Unfortunately this took a century. The more immediate Gilded Age gains from the 14th Amendment went to corporations.

The Southern Pacific Railroad objected to the taxes it was forced to pay in California. The railroad?s fight led to a series of Gilded Age court decisions, culminating in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886.

In this complicated case, the issue was the power of the state and counties to tax corporate property differently than individual property. The railroads contended that they were persons under the 14th Amendment ? and thus differential tax rates violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

They relied heavily on the arguments of Roscoe Conkling, a Republican senator from New York, who was active in the fight to ratify the amendment. Conkling was a friend of the Southern Pacific ? and also its lawyer.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/politico_rss/rss_politico_mostpop/http___www_politico_com_news_stories1011_67007_html/43414858/SIG=11m1k1uij/*http%3A//www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/67007.html

flight 93 shot down remembering 9/11 nfl schedule pentagon remember me arian foster nfl picks