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A Delaware judge has ruled that corporations have a right to vote. I have not yet had time to read the decision yet, but this seems to upend a lot of norms around voting in the US.
My immediate question is what... what the hell? This seems like a fairly bold decision on the part of the judge, and one that normally would not be issued by a state Superior court judge. Is there some kind of inside baseball that I'm missing here? I know that Delaware is very friendly to corporate interests, but this seems like an escalation. Is this a decision that's meant to be overturned?
That was the inevitable end game in the whole corporate personhood thing.
That ruling did not give corporations rights. It preserved the rights of individuals acting as a group.
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You talking about all the hoopla over Citizens United? I remember that case pretty well. Citizens United was decided based on a first amendment framework which supersedes congresses power to legislate.
You’d need a constitutional amendment to reverse CU and there’s no way that’s happening. Even so, it’s unclear that an amendment to overturn CU would be a good idea. If you actually read the decision (and let’s be honest, 99.99% of people have not), it’s a good piece of judicial thought and reasoning. Even the ACLU thinks CU was a good piece of jurisprudence.
(You can read the case here) CU was a major decision that impacts a ton of things, including the upcoming SCOTUS battles over net neutrality and ‘digital first amendment’/‘the right to post’ arguments.
This was the gist of it: individuals have first amendment rights. No argument there. Two people, working together, collectively have individual first amendment rights and as a group they have a right to expression. Same with 4 people all the way up 400,000 people, etc. So we can agree that groups of people working together have a collective set of first amendment rights. This concept already has a long and detailed history in the US; for example during the civil rights movement, people tried to shut down the NAACP/SPLC/SBLC/etc., by attacking them on an institutional level. SCOTUS (rightfully) said ‘Lol. Nice try, but no’.
So then take a step back: groups of people organized together under a common purpose have first amendment rights, we should all agree there. But isn’t a ‘company’ from a mom and pop restaurant up to Google and Amazon, simply a collection of people organized for a common goal? Just because a company is for-profit, it doesn’t mean that the government should be free to restrict their speech.
There’s a lot of people that try to be clever and say ‘corporations are people’, but this willfully misses the point. The real point is that corporations are simply a collection of people and those people have basic civil rights, so a group of people also has those same rights. Restricting political speech by the government simply because a group of people are pursuing profit doesn’t pass the ‘strict scrutiny’ test that all impingement to first amendment must pass. So SCOTUS struck down the FEC law.
It was a good decision. Keep in mind the alternatives: whatever the ruling was in CU v FEC was also going to be applied to groups you might care about, such as NAACP, EFF, Sierra Club, etc.
Now what about ‘commercial speech?’ Commercial speech falls into a weird category called ‘intermediate scrutiny’ where companies do face some restrictions but are largely free to say what they want. The important part is that CU v FEC specifically ‘only’ covers political speech. Commercial speech just wasn’t part of the debate.
At the end of the day, look at why people get upset at CU v FEC. It’s always the exact same argument dressed up slightly differently: “somebody is going to say something or believe in something I don’t like!” It’s always, “but Amazon is going to oppose Medicare for all!” Or “that power plant is going to advocate for coal!” People that fight against CU want to use it as a way to suppress speech they disagree with. That’s precisely why we have a first amendment and why it’s so important.
Any legislative act to reverse CU is going to be judged against the fact that it’s actively stripping first amendment rights from a group. Any judicial review by SCOTUS is going to be framed as the court stripping rights from people. People clearly want to argue that CU is bad, but pretend you are arguing before SCOTUS: what’s your legal theory behind why certain groups of people should have their speech suppressed? There’s not any really good arguments.
Because by creating LLC they have deliberately separated themselves from the company. Or more specifically if the person doesn't wear the brunt of the liability and is shielded, then stripping the corporation of rights doesn't infringe on the owner's rights.
Notably, the Citizens United organization is a 501(c)4, not an LLC. If you think that "stripping the corporation of rights" isn't a constitutional infringement, the ACLU is also a 501(c)4: can we silence them during election season too?
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Yes to your points and also the matter under dispute was if the Federal government can ban a documentary that was critical of Hillary Clinton. The government's representatives were arguing that they can and additionally have the power to ban books that have even a small portion political advocacy. Even one sentence of political advocacy is enough to trigger this power. They claimed they hold these powers during election season but not during other times.
It is a travesty that four justices agreed that the government can strip us of our first ammendment rights if a group makes something critical of Hillary Clinton before an election.
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