Carrol
On 10/29/2011 6:13 PM, SA wrote:
> On 10/29/2011 6:21 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
>>
>>> 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
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