- cross-posted to:
- LegalNews
- cross-posted to:
- LegalNews
“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed?
Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons.
The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”
You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”
Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million.
This notion of corporate personhood is purely for our own convenience, so corporations can enter into contracts, have bank accounts, and so on. In no universe did the folks who wrote that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” mean to include corporations on that. After all, corporations were not created by the same Creator as people, were they*?
I would be 100% in favor of an amendment that clearly spells out that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are limited to actual humans, and any corporation or other group of people are not entitled to any more inherent rights than the humans who make up the corporation are entitled to collectively. You don’t get more rights simply by paying a filing fee to Delaware!
This does not remove all of the privileges that we have granted corporations to make it easier to organize, but does mean that corporations have no inherent “right” to anything. Humans have those!
Edited to add: someone has proposed it already! https://www.movetoamend.org/amendment
* = Yes, this is Lemmy, so some snarky person will come along and say “of course they are! We made up both corporations and God!”. But, the founders were deists and believed in a Creator, so let’s try to look at it from their point of view, because that’s what our backwards Supreme Court does…
Perhaps not in the ways people wildly imagine, and perhaps that’s the intent.
No but by the same sorts of people who had the Tower of Babel built, intending to lord it over the common people.
We need to stop worshipping a piece of paper that’s become so bulky and cumbersome, and which was disingenuous, from the beginning. Portugal did that, and so can any other state.
My brother in Baphomet. That don’t make no sense. “People” (in general, excluding their direct descendents)… were not created by “same sorts” that created ziggurats… I get what you’re trying to do there, I really do, but that particular aside doesn’t make sense there semantically.
Yes, but also:
I agree with you in principle, but I will note that in the US it is hard to agree on anything new, and at least the Constitution has stood for 200+ years as something we all agree on, even as we disagree on how to interpret it.
And please expand on what you mean about Portugal. I am ignorant on their history, but according to Wikipedia they got their current constitution 50+ years ago, after a military coup. I would like to avoid a coup here, because I can’t really guarantee which side the military would pick…
Sigh.
Can’t you at least try to imagine improvements, from execution to safeguards? You know the United States exists because of violent revolution and no one could guarantee the outcome, right?
As it is now, if we don’t start taking steps to educate ourselves, the outcome is most assuredly guaranteed.
No, you dont get it. My objection isn’t that the outcome is uncertain, it’s that if the US military stages a coup in the US, it’s not clear to me which side it would be fighting for.
You don’t get it. There are other implications.
Did you mean amendments?
One of a great many reasons.
I said what I said.
No.
First of all, we’re not there yet, but to maybe avoid any future conflicts depicted in scifi, we should narrow the rights protected to persons, and then define what a person is that doesn’t constrict it to human. Or at least leave it open enough to allow different concepts of self aware beings while cutting off the very broad definition that allows a company to qualify.
How does that change the current law, though?
I’d be in favor of a rule that explains that organizing into associations doesn’t change the rights of the individuals who form the association, but also that the association would only have rights that relate to the actual purpose of forming the association in the first place (whether it’s a corporation, LLC, partnership, joint venture, other unincorporated associations).
So a church gets religious freedom. But a sandwich shop does not. A newspaper gets freedom of speech and may exercise editorial discretion on what goes on its pages. A telephone company does not, and cannot discriminate against the viewpoints expressed over its phone lines.
There are trickier issues: can a government ban halal slaughter, and would a Muslim-owned butcher shop be entitled to a religious exemption (if, assuming, individuals were granted that exemption)? I’d argue you have to look to the nature of the business or organization to determine whether that particular right applies to that organization, so the butcher shop can invoke the religion of the human butcher, and possibly even the human customers who want to buy halal meat.
But the framework makes sense to me, and is closely related to the principle of organizational standing, where something like a nonprofit association of apple growers can sue on behalf of apple grower rights, despite not being an organization that actually directly grows apples. That’s how corporate rights should work: look to the reason for incorporating and the nature of the organization, and how it relates to the nature of the right at issue.
How does that work with indie pharmacies and birth control, or bakeries asked to decorate pro/antitrans cakes?