The Supremes Bow to King Corporation
By RALPH NADER

There is a glimmer of hope and a touch of reality in yesterday's Supreme Court decision. Unfortunately it is the powerful 90 page dissent in this case by Justice Stevens joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. Justice Stevens recognizes the power corporations wield in our political economy. Justice Stevens finds it "absurd to think that the First Amendment prohibits legislatures from taking into account the corporate identity of a sponsor of electoral advocacy." He flatly declares that, "The Court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation."

He notes that the, Framers of our Constitution "had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind." Right he is, for the words "corporation" or "company" do not exist in our Constitution.

Were the protections of the First Amendment understood by any of the parties ratifying the Constitution as extending to juridical persons? If there is nothing in the document itself to warrant this interpretation, is there anything in the common law of the time? If not, then is not the ruling by the "conservatives" dependent upon a reading that is imposed upon the Constitution? How can this be originalist?

Alexander Cockburn:

This being America, the U.S. Supreme Court returned fire that same Thursday with its Citizens United v. FEC decision striking down ancient laws and precedents and giving corporations their First Amendment rights to have nine fingers on the nation’s political windpipe instead of eight – which was the status quo ante which editorialists bizarrely lament as a Golden Age of electoral probity, only now destroyed by Chief Justice Roberts and his black-hat gang of judicial activists. There’s doleful talk of a “return to the era of the Robber Barons”. I thought we had Barons’ Homecoming a generation ago, though Citizens United v FEC does, even more brazenly than usual, blare the message that in America corporations rule and that the Supreme Court is their errand boy.