You did provide cites, but their content doesn’t address the issues raised. Many things are forbidden under the law, until the law is challenged in court.
Citizens United, for instance.
I didn’t disagree that those cites say what you say they say, I disagree that what they say would matter at all if a court was hearing the case. There is no exception in or to the Dictionary Act in US law that I know of: corporations are persons, and they have all the same rights as any other person. Thus far, none of the cites you’ve provided address that at all.
I would be happy to be wrong about this; I want to be wrong about this. But so far you haven’t shown that to be the case.
In order to vote, you must register, and when you register, you need to show some form of ID. The listed forms of ID for Colorado include birth certificates, driver’s licenses (for which you need a birth certificate or something like it), passports, and a variety of other things, none of which corporations can get. It does not include articles of incorporation.
A corporation can own a car, but a corporation cannot get a driver’s license.
My guess about adoption is that somewhere in a state’s adoption laws there is a distinction about natural persons, which corporations are not. In any case there are age requirements. Is your corporation 21 years old?
Corporations do not have all the rights of a natural person. If they did, the phrase “natural person” would not exist.
You said, and your cite also shows, that Alaskan adults over the age 18 can adopt. Why couldn’t a corporation that was more than 18 years old adopt? Is there a law that specifically says only a natural person can adopt?
I did look at the Alaska Rules of Court - Alaska Adoption Rules, but I didn’t see a single occurrence of the phrase “natural person” and only 3 times that “corporation” was used, although one of those was as part of the word “incorporation”.
It doesn’t need to be tested in court because it doesn’t pass the common sense test. You really don’t see a reason why they should be denied the right to vote? Creating a corporation takes just a couple hundred dollars in filing fees. A person with a billion dollars could right now create a few hundred million corporations. In 18 years, by your rationalization, all of those corporations would have the right to vote. So now, this one rich person can control every single election. He can vote HIMSELF into office, as long as he spread his corporations out among the entire country and registered them equally among the states. He wins all 100% of the electoral vote and a vast majority of the popular vote. Does that sound like democracy to you? If corporations could vote, then the richest people could directly control the elections. The fact that no one has tried to do this, and that it has never been challenged in court, is enough reason to believe that it is impossible. If it were even close to possible, someone would have tried it. Hell, a foreign government would have tried it! They could just give a citizen a billion dollars and control America.
Absence of any court challenge is enough to prove that your idea is so wrong, that it doesn’t even require case law.
I realize I was using general number terms like 1 billion and hundreds of millions. It’s not quite that insane. But if the average filing fee is about $200, then with $10 billion (pennies for an organization interested in controlling the entire United States), a person or group could create 50 million voters (once those corporations turned 18 years old). That’s 15% of the current population. When was the last time the presidential election was decided by more than a third of that? Anyway, the point is valid, if not the exact math.
Federal Court’s lack authority over such state matters such as divorce, probate, domestic relations, etc. There are judicially created exceptions such as noted in Marshall v. Marshall, the Anna Nicole Smith case. That’s my source, but I’m not a lawyer.
If a common sense test was all it took, IMO, they never would have defined a person to include corporations in the first place. So, yeah, I have some trouble with what might actually constitutes “common sense” in many instances.
Oh, I see lots of them. I just don’t see how it can be done with the current laws, should someone really want to test things.
I admit that the phrase “unless the context indicates otherwise” sounds like a nifty potential loophole, but I am not at all confident that “context” could be found when applying laws to actual situations that wasn’t simply arbitrary.