To quote the opening statement of the bill itself:
I really wish that stood a chance. I really, really do. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at these numbers. The Citizens United decision had immense public disdain, from all political affiliations (although the republicans polled at 10 points below the dems on this issue, that’s still 75 fucking %), and the will of the people should be followed. Granted, those are from 2010, but I don’t think that the public opinion of the citizen’s united decision has changed drastically. There, 8 out of 10 Americans support removing this law. 65% of them strongly oppose the abilities the decision grants.
Think about that for a minute. In this democratic republic, a law which, theoretically, 80% of the population should favor and which 65% should love… Doesn’t stand a chance.
This movement doesn’t stand a chance of making it through congress. Not a snowball’s chance in hell. In order to pass it, they need a super majority (in order to amend the constitution), and I’d be shocked if it got any real support from either party, mainly because that sort of political donation is the bread and butter of politicians. That’s how they finance campaigns. Nobody would be freely willing to give that kind of dough up, and even if we elect different politicians, we’d be extremely hard-pressed to find 60 senators and god knows how many representatives who would be willing to put their own personal gain below the will of the people.
I’m going to make a prediction right now. This is either going to:
a) Go absolutely nowhere and get absolutely no support from either party
or
b) Become another democrat vs. republican partisan issue, with the republicans coming down hard on the side of the corporate interests
(B being the more likely case)
…Anyways… Is there any good reason why this shouldn’t pass?
I think if you tried to advance this the first thing do would be to simplify the proposal to eliminate the free speech rights of all non-natural persons. Not just for-profit corporations. Why should gun owners be allowed to organize and petition for their interests, but thousands of capital gains and dividend earners should have to deal with their representatives as individuals.
I’m with you on this one. I think right now, and maybe for a long time, the Roberts court is defined by this decision, which was horrible.
Corporations are not people. Corporations are a legal invention designed to protect people. If you believe otherwise you should advocate that every corporation should be able to register to vote and cast a vote. Then the parties can try to fix elections by registering millions of corporations and have them vote according to their whim.
Sounds ridiculous, yes. But think about it. With the Citizen’s United decision the Robert’s court is allowing corporations to cast votes in a more insidious method which is that they can buy political influence. That actually makes corporations superior to people. So now corporations don’t protect people, they diminish and disenfranchise people.
"We the People . . " What a ridiculous statement that was. It should have been “We the Corporations.”
Obligatory IANACL – One objection that would be raised, as mentioned, is that it applies beyond Citizens United and “money = speech”, to remove ALL protection of constitutional rights (at the federal level) for these “corporate persons”. Not that I would cry bitter tears at that, but it would be hard to get a large enough coalition to support it due to concerns as to, for instance, protecting shareholders’ joint-but-still-private property against “takings”. Could be done IMO, but it could get messy.
As to TheMightyAtlas’s observation, there is the matter that even under this amendment groups of individuals would still be protected under the Assembly and Petition clause. As in, even if we limit corporations, or even nonprofit associations whose ostensible purpose is nonpolitical, we still could not prevent any group of citizens from gathering and founding an entity chartered explicitly and specifically for the purpose of campaigning for a cause, funded by individual donations, could we? Political parties and movements for X or Y cause (e.g. abolitionist/suffragist/temperance societies) existed before Corporate Personhood took its modern form. Or am I missing something?
For those not aware, the decision involved whether or not the government had the right to shut down a movie critical of a political candidate during an election, specifically Hillary: The Movie.
The Court held this was unconstitutional and that the government had no right to restrict people’s ability to agitate in favor of or against political candidates during an election.
The decision was a great victory for Free Speech and celebrated by such right-wing groups as the ACLU.
The ACLU felt of course that it was outrageous that groups were getting fined for distributing leaflets or putting out radio and tv ads criticizing the political records of various candidates.
Why was the ACLU wrong?
How is the government prohibiting people from criticizing political candidates, or at least dramatically restricting their ability to do so not a violation of the First Amendment?
The only thing you’re missing is that such a proposed amendment would nullify the right of groups to petition the government (where two sections of the constitution disagree, the newer section holds). Individuals could still do so under the 1st amendment, but not groups. It would be a staggering blow to free speech in the US, placing us on par with totalitarian regimes the world over on this issue.
It’s also an example of why the poll numbers don’t mean much to me-- people do not understand this issue. Even the polling question left it vague as to whether or not corporation could contribute directly to political campaigns under this court decision (the can’t). Here’s what was asked:
I would bet $100 that most people answering that question think that corporations can donate “as much money as they want” to Obama’s campaign. In fact, they can’t donate any money to the campaigns directly.
What he alluded to were laws against falsely shouting fire in a crowded movie theatre.
Secondly, the case you’re referring to Schenck Vs. the United States involved a man getting arrested for protesting against the draft during wartime and encouraging people not to enlist.
Now, since you’re referring to Schenck v. The United States and based on that fact seem to approve of the case, I’ll assume that you do feel that the US government has the right to lock people up in jail for “encouraging insubordination” and urging people to refuse to enlist, but most of us would disagree, and following the Vietnam War, the courts and the US government disagree.
That said, even Schenck V. The United States doesn’t help you because it applied to wartime conditions and laws regarding people trying to interfere the war making capabilities of the US.
Holmes justified the decision by stating “when a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”
Now, leaving aside the fact that the US is hardly “at war” in the sense it was in WWI, unless you can somehow demonstrate that a documentary criticizing Hillary Clinton somehow is affecting the US ability to wage war, then your argument makes no sense.
I’m also quite surprised that you seem to approve of Holmes decision since I think it was an appalling bad one and I suspect most people reading this would agree.
If anything, I think Holmes’ decision heightened the need to protect the First Amendment and why free speech is so necessary.
Allowing people to call Cheney a crook without actually bringing a criminal prosecution against him is an insult to human dignity. Anybody who does that should be arrested.
Deliberately causing a stampede by FALSELEY shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre is no different morally than (say) falsely reporting the financial condition of a company to profit from the stock price changes.
But spending your money to influence the outcome of an election by putting out a message that might change the minds of voters is a fundamental value in a free democratic society. You need to have a very, very high standard to restrict or prohibit it. “Waaah! The people are too stupid to realize that they are being manipulated!” does not meet the standard.
As Ibn Warraq points out, this is exactly what Citizens United was about.
No, it shifts power to the wealthy. If you allow unlimited spending you turn the political process into an auction. And as it happens, there are no high money bidders on the side of non corporations. If politics in America becomes a war between corporations the conversation shifts so that the contrasting rights of individual citizens isn’t even on the table.
The reason you can’t yell “fire” in a theater is because the damage is weighed against your right to speech. The damage that limitless money does to our system is far worse than a few squashed grannies. The US wasn’t meant to be an oligarchy.
In practical terms, there would be some difficulties in applying the proposed amendment to media corporations. Presumably editorials and opinion pieces would be forbidden, and TV opinion programming like Meet The Press. Limbaugh would be gone, and presumably so would Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. Where there’s occasional political content in an otherwise non-political show, like Leno or Letterman, I guess they’d have to bleep those lines.
But what about ordinary journalism? Paying someone to attend and report on a speech or a debate is spending money on an election, even if the goal is just to increase public awareness. What about “fact-checking” articles and websites? Should it matter if a get-out-the-vote effort is ostensibly non-partisan, but targeted at an audience that skews to one party (like MTV’s Rock The Vote)?
Would Creative Loafing be barred from hosting a message board where one of the things participants do is advocate for election outcomes?
One purpose of the Bill of Rights, though, is to safeguard minority interests from majoritarian control.
“Its” refers to the first amendment, which reads as follows:
The majority was absolutely right in Citizens United. So was the ACLU in reaction. Corporations are just an association of people. Restricting “non-human” entities is a smokescreen; the corporate “voice” is the voice of people, the same as the ACLU’s, the SCLC’s, the Catholic Church, Planned Parenthood and any other association you can think of–though, as Scalia points out, it doesn’t matter if you agree with this or not. The first amendment provides no basis for restricting any entity’s speech based solely on the nature of that entity.
Like the effect or not, the first amendment does not permit the sorts of laws that Citizens United rightly struck down. Sanders’ amendment would be a stunning restriction of liberty.
Allowed corporations to essentially buy politicians. Through their unlimited spending and their greatly higher means when compared to any other segment of the population, they are at a position of much higher power than they should reasonably be in a democracy.
I’m well aware of this. The problem, however, is that this ruling had consequences reaching far beyond that. Pointing this out is all well and good, but it’s basically saying, “It’s the thought that counts” when someone, in an attempt to fix a problem with the local sewage treatment plant, opens a valve that starts draining it into the local water supply, and using that to justify not fixing the pipe. The fact of the matter is that the Citizens United case blew the balance of democracy brutally out of whack.
This isn’t what bothers people. “People” can criticize, support, and donate to political candidates. This is all well and good. But here’s the thing, and here’s what Sanders is asserting: corporations are not people.
Corporations still can’t donate to political candidates.
Would you feel better if we created a new category calling it a “thingamabob”, and then allowed thingamabobs to spend money on political speech? That way you can stop the silly chanting that “corporations aren’t people”, because no one is claiming that they are equivalent to people.
This. Would it make some people feel better if all shareholders of a corporation simply formed a new group called “People for a Balanced Budget” or some such thing. Would these posters feel that this group of people should not have a right to free speech or to assemble?
That’s not even one step away from saying something like, “If Rush Limbaugh’s choice for the GOP nomination would get elected President, it would destroy the country. Therefore, Rush Limbaugh’s right of free speech takes a back seat to the good of the country, so we can pass a law outlawing Rush Limbaugh from speaking, even in private, on any political topic.”
Substitute any individual or group into the above. Because you think that this person’s beliefs are subjectively bad and would be bad for the country, we can outlaw them?