>
>> In other words, you think the government should have the right to
>> shut down the NAACP, ACLU, Amnesty International, etc. According to
>> you, they should have no constitutional rights because they aren't
>> natural persons.
>
> No way. NAACP, ACLU, Amnesty International, etc. are *membership*
> associations, collectively exercising the personal constitutional
> rights of their members. In the (paraphrased?) citation from NAACP v.
> Button this is emphasized: "but a corporation may also assert free
> speech and free assembly rights on behalf of its members." A
> for-profit corporation has no members, only stockholders. That an
> association has *legal* personhood alters in no way the principle that
> its constitutional rights are those of its members.
Fascinating. A few minutes ago, you wrote:
> The call to abolish corporate personhood consists simply of this
> proposition:
>
> "All rights as specified in the US Constitution or as retained by the
> people under the Ninth Amendment apply to all natural persons and only
> to natural persons."
Now you've scrapped that. Now you say that a non-natural person like the NAACP *should* have constitutional rights, because it acts *on behalf* of its members, who are natural persons. Of course, that's exactly what I was saying. But you're trying to wriggle out of it through a comic semantic maneuver: *for-profit* corporations should *not* have their collective constitutional rights protected because the natural persons they act on behalf of aren't "members," they're "stockholders." As if the word "member" had some magical constitutional property attached to it, or as if "stockholder" weren't simply the word we use for a member of a for-profit corporation.
In any case, let's think about your brand new, revised constitutional doctrine, invented on the fly. The new doctrine is that for-profit corporations with stockholders have no constitutional rights. Therefore, the Bush administration would have been entirely within its rights to seize and shut down the New York Times in response to James Risen's reporting on illegal wiretapping. If the NYT claimed its First Amendment rights were being abridged, the proper answer would be that the NYT -- a non-natural person with no legitimate "members" (only stockholders) -- has no First Amendment or other constitutional rights. Only natural persons have First Amendment rights.
Is that correct? Or will a new revision to the doctrine of corporate non-personhood be forthcoming?
SA