Money is Speech and a Corporations is equivalent to an Individual

Slate has some excellent commentary and investigation on how the Supreme Court reached the concepts of Money being equal to Speech and a Corporation is equivalent to an individual. These two concepts are the critical flaws in the Supreme Courts granting unlimited campaign funding rights to Corporations and any other special interest group. Here is a sampler:

Go back almost a century, to the time when the modern corporation was created, and you’ll find laws that prohibit or limit the use of corporate money in elections. And yet this week, a 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the limits that Congress passed in 2002 in this tradition in the case Citizens United v. FEC.

The majority’s ruling unleashes a new wave of campaign cash and adds to the already considerable power of corporations. The court’s main rationale is that limits on using corporate treasuries for campaigns are a “classic example of censorship,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. To get there, Kennedy depends on two legal theories that blossomed as constitutional principles in the mid-1970s: money is speech and corporations are people. Both theories are strange, if not simply wrongheaded—why, according to the Constitution or common sense, would money be speech or corporations be people? The court has also employed theories not uniformly but, rather, as constitutional cover for dominance of the electoral system by corporations and by the wealthy.

See the complete article here.

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