Corporate political spending limits rejected

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 24 January 2010 01:53AM CST

Section: Law

Tipping lawThis past Thursday the US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (.pdf; 2.6MB), ruled that the US government may not limit the spending of corporations in political elections. The only limitation on corporate political speech that remains is the ban on direct contributions to candidates. Welcome to the United Corporations of America, where every vote is for sale and each of them has a price.

Corporations were granted fictional personhood in 1886 when the US Supreme Court, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, found that corporations were subject to due process and beneficiaries of the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. With that decision, corporations were solidly identified with private property instead of the public grants and interests that had been their overarching governance previously. That single decision also significantly weakened the public claims on corporate charters, and is seen by most corporate governance experts as an endorsement of the corporation being a “natural entity” with natural rights, rather than a created fiction chartered by the state for a specific purpose in the public interest, subject to state control. It was a mistake; an error.

As David D. Kirkpatrick notes in the New York Times, “A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union, or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.”

The court’s ultra-conservative majority used a questionable interpretation of the First Amendment to establish that corporations enjoy the same constitutional protections as citizens. Except more. In short, if this ruling does nothing else—and many experts claim that large corporations will not exercise their new rights—it more solidly codifies corporate personhood. Already some corporations are not welcoming this new development. According to an Associated Press report, some 40 corporate executives sent a letter to congressional leaders, through Fair Elections Now, urging approval for public financing of US congressional elections.

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