The Other Supreme Court Rulings
While the Arizona immigration case certainly got the bulk of the attention from the press today there were a couple of other rulings to look at.
In American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock the court, on a 5-4 ruling, basically upheld the prior ruling in Citizens United by striking down a Montana law which placed limits on corporate contributions to political campaigns.
It is worth noting that the law focused only on corporations, it did not place any limits on contributions from labor organizations or private donors, just from corporations.
Needless to say the reaction is pretty much the same as it was for Citizens United. I am reluctant to accept the concept of a corporation as having free speech rights myself.
The excellent site Scotusblog.com has a good summary and review of the decision.
In the case of Miller v. Alabama the court struck down mandatory life sentences for juvenile defendants.
In the underlying case they had two defendants, one had beaten a neighbor and set their house on fire, leaving them to die. In the other the defendant had been involved in a robbery in which another criminal shot and killed a clerk.
The court did not dismiss the idea that an underage defendant could get an adult sentence but they could not be sentenced to mandatory life sentence
SB has a good summary here.
Scotusblog also has a very good review of the Arizona immigration case.
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How about this, should you loose your free speech rights if you are part of a corporation? Or we could just go with what the court said in citizens united “political speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because its source is a corporation….”
LOL
The individual in a corporation loses their free speech the minute they’re hired. Look at how HR looks at a persons Internet history in detriming hiring and firing. Yet, the same corporation(non person) has the right of CASH/free speech…
If you are a shareholder, you are exercising free speech through your corporation’s money to purchase legislators (for regulation purposes). If you are a taxpayer, you are exercising free speech through your vote to elect said purchased legislators (because they say they will or will not regulate corporations, but we all know better don’t we).
So you get free speech whether you are a shareholder or a tax payer and double free speech if you are both (which doesn’t seem fair somehow – shouldn’t it be one man one vote?). And the environment still gets devastated either way. Simple, what? It looks
simplestupid to me.Sorry, Montana, you got screwed as we all did with CU.
First it wouldn’t be the govt restricting free speech and it also wouldn’t be restricting free speech because while you have an innate right to freedom you don’t have a right to a particular job. Finally the biggest reason your example is wrong is that you would have to use shareholders instead of employees to be valid.
Corporations are abstract concepts we use to facilitate business. It is amazing to me that anyone can confuse them with a person deserving of rights such as speech, and desire/freedom to practice religion. The idea that a corporation can use its funds to spend on elections is so absurd I really have to question the mind of anyone who thinks that makes sense. Yes, we can “limit” the “free speech” of a corporation without coming anywhere near attacking the the rights of, you know, actual people. It is as absurd to me as PETA fighting to get rights for wild animals. If you can’t see the difference that is because you are being willfully ignorant to make your point.
Corporations are deemed legal persons for purposes of taxation and shielding shareholders from liability, and are entitled to all protections guaranteed under the 14th amendment (because they are a legal person) and are entitled to all protections granted under the 1st amendment. It is interesting to note what corporations, as legal persons, may not do. From Wikipedia:
[There are limitations to the legal recognition of legal persons. Legal entities cannot marry, they usually cannot vote or hold public office,[3] and in most jurisdictions there are certain positions which they cannot occupy.[4] The extent to which a legal entity can commit a crime varies from country to country. Certain countries prohibit a legal entity from holding human rights; other countries permit artificial persons to enjoy certain protections from the state that are traditionally described as human rights.[5]
Special rules apply to legal persons in relation to the law of defamation. Defamation is the area of law in which a person’s reputation has been unlawfully damaged. This is considered an ill in itself in regard to natural person, but a legal person is required to show actual or likely monetary loss before a suit for defamation will succeed.]
Now, one could argue that since they cannot vote or hold public office, they should be prohibited from participating in any activity that influences real persons that are voting or holding office, though I haven’t seen that argument made.
The doubled influence of real persons who are also shareholders seems to me to be a sticking point.
Lets look at the actual case that changed the law. Citizens United was a Corp but it was a non-profit formed just to make and distribute a movie. How can you think stopping them from releasing that movie, or newspaper, or flyer, or web page, would be anything but encroaching on the rights of “actual people”? Now I get that people are concerned with the result of the decision but instead of arguing that it justifies the limits on speech you guys are trying to pretend that it is something other than what it is. It is not treating corps as people, rather it’s acknowledging that corps are made up of people and any grouping of people still has a right to free speech no matter what form or group they are in.
It should be remembered that this applies to unions also. If free speech lies only with individuals, then unions don’t have a right to free speech. Ironically, given how the left is agitated over this, this is probably more critical for unions.
Why is it that so many comment about corporations and their right to spend unlimited amounts of money being bad, but nothing was ever said about the unions spending members money in unlimited ways for years and that is not bad.
If one hand of business (management) is bad spending unlimited amounts, why is it not bad for the other hand (labor) to do the same thing.
Could it be liberals support unions and unions support democrats, while conservatives support coporations and corporations support republicans for the most part?
Davidpsummers..You made the point 2 minutes before me.
One thing we forgot and I glossed over, unions had been doing this for many many years, well before the SCOTUS decision.
Of course, anything that pertains to corporations pertains to unions with the obvious exception of the difference between how much influence shareholders have over the corporations’ political expenditures and how much influence the union members have over the unions’ political spending. If you think there is no difference, I suggest you talk to a union memeber, if you can find one.
Of course both have been doing it for years, but never before have they had Super Pacs with non-disclosure abilities. Even though there is a law against foreign entities donations, there is no way to force them to disclose such donations. None.
When they stop taking union dues from my wife’s retirement check and simultaneously robocall her for every Dem candidate, I will feel sorry for the unions. Oh, and by the way each union member and corporate officer or employee is free to contribute to any party they wish.
The real change in CU in practice is not that corporations can now donate with impugnity as much as they want, but that they can effectively donate to candidates themselves, or to organizations against candidates. Sure, they’re “PACs”, but they’re obviously just different branches of their candidate’s campaign. If corporations were to donate to individual candidates and those candidates had to run for office themselves instead of leaving the dirty work to the PACs, they’d be subject to the same campaign limits as the rest of us. Individuals, corporations, and unions have always been able to give tons of money to causes, just not to individual candidates, or against individual candidates. There were some problems with the way this worked — having Philip Morris spend bazillions to fight against new tobacco taxes on the ballot is a clear example — but being allowed to donate essentially directly to a candidate is a much bigger problem.
In other words, I’d be kind of ok with corporations being people if they had the same campaign limits to push the candidates of the their choice as the rest of the real people.
Unions and corporations are two very different animals. Unions are formed to look after the interests of their members and to advocate for them. Corporations are in no way obligated to look after the employees. Nor do the employees of companies pay money to the corporation. In fact, the ability to screw over their employees is one of the things many corporations actually lobby for. Unions actually represent the people that comprise them, so when they put money towards a goal its assumed they are looking out for the people within it. Corporations look after their own interests, and historically to the detriment of not only their employees but to the general population. That’s why we regulate them. I really don’t see how there can be any confusion on the two types of groups.
Slam, the union has taken away my wife’s fight of free speech. If they were fair, they would apportion their robocalls and other advocacy efforts on a proportional basis, truly representing their membership.
And, why the F*** can’t each member and each employee contribute on their own. Both unions and corporations are bullies, that is why.
When you talk about corps you must speak of shareholders not employees in comparison to other groups. Also there is the mistaken belief that all corps are just money hungry beast. Corps are as different as people. Some are formed to make money, others to provide services (non-profits), heck gay couples formed corps to safeguard finances when they couldn’t marry. The idea that there is some cookie cutter form that all corps take is obviously false. If that idea is false then what else is also.
Free speech must be too difficult for us citizens to understand.
I’m glad a politically appointed court clarified it for us.
Now please allow me to school the courts in applied math, since this is my area of life study.
Your court rulings are statistically significantly with the stated desired outcome of the party (president) that appointed you.
Bias. Plain. Simple.
*REFORM NEEDED*
Yup………….