On Sun, 24 Jan 2010, SA wrote:
> In response to the Citizens United decision, there seems to be a movement
> afoot by some folks on the left to amend the Constitution to end corporate
> personhood. See here: http://www.movetoamend.org/ . Maybe I'm missing
> something important, but this seems insane.
I've just been reading the dissent to the Citizens United case (written by Stevens, but joined by all four). And according to Stevens, when it comes to regulating campaign spending, Congress has been happily making a legal distinction between natural and corporate persons since the Tillman Act of 1907. Pace Stevens, the law on this was a long settled cumulative tradition until this decision threw it all out with what seems in his telling like pretty dubious legal maneuvers.
>From this I take it that:
1) A century's experience has shown that there is no inherent systemic problem with passing laws that give corporate persons fewer protections that natural persons; and thus
2) The amendment drive here could be fixed with a few words so that it wasn't crazy. Instead of abolishing corporate personhood, the amendment could simply say that Congress and the states can pass laws that discriminate between corporate and natural persons when such discrimination is found to be in the public interest.
Which I think is really what people who sign this mean. They don't really want to abolish corporations. They just want to be free to pass laws to curb what they can do.
Michael