Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

[INRM]

Dancing David

That is the basis of the hundred year tradition of rstricting corporate influence in elections.

For good reason

 

[linusrichard]

I'm confused by the focus on the employees. The group of individuals that make up a corporation is its stock-holders, not its employees.

Once again, the corporation is not made up of stockholders. It is owned by them.

 

[jsfisher]

Once again, the corporation is not made up of stockholders. It is owned by them.

Once again, sure it is.

 

[SezMe]

Once, once again, no it isn't. A corporation is distinct from its employees or owners. For example, a corporation may have no employees and be owned by another corporation. A corporation set up, for example, in Bermuda as a pure tax dodge.

 

[linusrichard]

Once again, sure it is.

The citation you're looking for should be on one of these pages. Take your time.

 

[Dancing David]

So they're like, robots and puppies and stuff?

They are social conventions of contract law, corporation are comprised of many people and porperties.

They are the same as a 'partnership' or marriage, just because two people are married does not mean that they are now a 'legal person'. Neither is the United Way or ACORN or the University of Illinois.

Now SCOTUS will rule after considerable deliberation, but why should Nestle-Beich be allowed to give untold amounts of money to American politicians?

 

[Dancing David]

No, the question is how acting as an economic unit deprives the individuals comrising thta unit of their rights.

They have rights as individuals, and are welcome to exercise them as they wish as individuals.

The question one between SCOTUS and Congress.

So why should Congress not be able to leislate the behavior of organizations, theya re comprised of individuals but not individuals. If I own stock in GE and they lobby in a way that I disagree with, how is that not violating my rights? I have the right to give money as an individual. But i sure don't want my union (the CESP) to give any money to ANY political canidates.

 

[Dancing David]

Really? Curtailing their right to free speech isn't depriving them of anything?

Try to read next time.

Wow, you showed him. You are curtailing the rights of a legal entity which exists only because a legislature has given it existance. You are not curtailing the rights of the individuals.
Now SCOTUS will decide as it decides.

 

[jsfisher]

Once, once again, no it isn't. A corporation is distinct from its employees or owners. For example, a corporation may have no employees and be owned by another corporation. A corporation set up, for example, in Bermuda as a pure tax dodge.

Let's go back to my original question to you. It was why were you focusing on the employees of a corporation in arguing against FlamingMoe's assertion about rights of corporation extending from the rights of a group.

I don't support FlamingMoe's assertion, but FlamingMoe's statements certainly seemed to imply he was referring to the shareholders. Thus my confusion and interest in why you commented on the employees.

 

[SezMe]

Let's go back to my original question to you. It was why were you focusing on the employees of a corporation in arguing against FlamingMoe's assertion about rights of corporation extending from the rights of a group.

I don't support FlamingMoe's assertion, but FlamingMoe's statements certainly seemed to imply he was referring to the shareholders. Thus my confusion and interest in why you commented on the employees.

Fair question. Here is Moe's first post in this thread:

Well there is the piddly little detail that corporations are comprised of groups of people, and groups of people do not give up any rights they held prior to grouping together simply by virtue of doing so. Ergo, the group still has the right to free speech.

Go go Citizens United!

In response, I said:

No, corporations are NOT comprised of groups of people. Corporations are entities chartered by one of the States. This new entity may well hire lots of people but that fact does not transfer the rights of those individuals to the completely different entity that gave them a job.

Note I used the word "hire" which implies (correctly) that I thought that he was talking of employees. His response to my post was:

So they're like, robots and puppies and stuff?

Note he did NOT correct me to clearly state he was talking about corporate owners, not its employees.

His next post was:

No, the question is how acting as an economic unit deprives the individuals comrising thta unit of their rights.

Again, he made no attempt to correct my post about employees nor did he make clear what set of individuals he was referring to.

In summary, you are correct that I assumed he was talking about employees and made that clear in my first post. Since he made no effort to correct me and did not, himself, make a clear statement what collection of individuals he was talking about, I think I was being reasonable in continuing with my initial assumption.

So let's take jsfisher's timely query to the One Himself. Moe, in your very first post in this thread where you used the phrase, "...corporations are comprised of groups of people..." were you referring to employees, stockholders or some other group?

Thanks.

 

[FlamingMoe]

I was referring to the people who control the the actions of the corporation, which would be the shareholders/board of directors.

 

[SezMe]

I am hard pressed to imagine how buying a share of stock in a corporation would affect one's free speech rights.

 

[Brown]

There were some hints that either the majority or the dissent in the case (which conventional wisdom says will be a 5-to-4 decision, a proposition against which I will not bet) will discuss the concept of "natural rights."

Natural rights were a really big deal to those men who founded the USA. The basic idea is that people have certain rights merely by being people. The rights do not have to come from, say, a king who rules by divine right. The concept of natural rights appears prominently in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The "Creator," by the way, is not necessarily the Christian deity. The official position of the Christian deity--according to his self-appointed spokesmen at the time--was that there was no right to rebel against a monarchy that ruled by divine right.

Natural rights also are implied by the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not say "All persons shall have the following rights...." Instead, it assumes that certain rights (freedom from the establishment of religion, freedom of exercise of religion, freedom of speech, etc.) already exist, and the principal law-making body (Congress) shall make no law "respecting" such rights.

Corporations do not have organic life, and so they do not have a natural right to life. Although corporations may have certain liberties, they cannot be tossed in prison. Corporations do have rights to property, but such rights arguably come from governmental grant, not from nature. Corporations have the right to petition the government, but once again, they have standing only if they have met the governmental criteria for incorporation. Religion-based corporations have successfully claimed Free Exercise and Establishment rights, even though it may be difficult to see how a fictitious entity can actually have a religion.

Corporations do have some free speech and "press" interests. The corporations that control the television networks and major newspapers zealously protect those rights.

The extent of corporate rights is not an easy issue.

But we might reasonably look for a dissertation by either the majority or the dissent about the extent of rights (natural or otherwise) of corporations.

 

[lomiller]

As alluded to on the first page, the whole point of a corporation is to make it an independent entity that is legally separate from the owners. This means, for example you can’t be sued for the actions of a corporation you own stock it, not can you be held criminally responsible for any illegal actions taken by for a corporation which you own stock. To suggest that such an entity should still have “free speech on your behalf” is absurd in too many ways to count.

 

[INRM]

If I recall correctly, the Supreme Court did not specifically rule that Corporations are people, the guy who read the ruling said it did and that was what was written down and that became law

 

[MikeMangum]

Maybe not. While most corporate and union money go to incumbents, if this "self-denying thing" stands then it will likely continue to go overwhelmingly to incumbents but there will be even more of it going to them.

Campaign finance reform is little more than incumbent protection legislation.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_policy_history/v014/14.1zelizer.html

Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) warned his fellow senators in 1973 about the private financing of elections. "f it doesn't stop, there are going to be good men in this hall right here today who are going down the drain, not that you are guilty, not that you have done anything wrong, but that the public is disenchanted with all of us, and they are going to want somebody new and say I want a fresh one here."

That was the motivation for the 1973 campaign finance reform legislation: keeping "good men" (incumbents) from losing their seats.

Try starting up a political campaign for some local issue or office under the current rules and you will quickly see that the price of entrance is enormous due to the very complex rules regarding financing. Just attempting to, as a private citizen, advocate for or against a specific candidate or position has complex rules that must be deciphered. To be able to run a political campaign (not even just running for office, but including trying to organize a group to advocate for or against a candidate or issue) requires hiring people like this. If you have money, you can afford to hire the lawyers and accountants necessary to figure out what is and isn't legal and what your reporting responsibilities are.

Of course, if you are wealthy enough, you can simply buy or create a media company, at which point you can editorialise all you want. Unless you live in Washington State like I do, where advocacy by radio deejays for an initiative repealing a tax increase is considered an "in kind" contribution. How an initiative (a piece of paper) is going to provide some quid pro quo in return for the "in kind contribution", I have yet to learn.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/political-speech-not-as-free-as-you-think/

in 2000, FEC investigators descended on Muleshoe, Texas, a small farming town of just under 5,000 inhabitants west of Lubbock. They were looking into a complaint filed against local citizens who made the horrible mistake of putting up competing signs alternately supporting Al Gore or George Bush. This political rivalry started when Harvey Bass, the owner of the local furniture store, took an empty refrigerator box, painted “Save Our Nation, Vote Democrat, Al Gore for President” on the side, and placed the box on the porch of his store.

Two other local citizens, Bill Liles and Mark Morton, got tired of looking at this sign. With the help of some of their friends, they had a bigger sign painted that read, in part, “Vote for George W. Bush for President … Not Al Gore Socialism.” They hung it on a borrowed cotton trailer and parked it across the street so that Bass “would have to look at it every time he walked out the front door of his business.”

After subjecting Liles, Morton, and two other locals to an extensive investigation, the lawyers for the FEC found that they had violated federal law because their homemade sign did not have a disclaimer. In other words, it did not say who had paid for the sign and whether or not it was approved by the candidate, even though everyone in this very small town apparently knew who was responsible. The political competition was a general topic of conversation at the Spudnut Shop on Main Street and the Dinner Bell Café on Highway 84. The FEC’s general counsel recommended sending an admonishment letter — he could just as easily have recommended a civil penalty — but fortunately wisdom prevailed amongst the commissioners and they voted simply to close the file without taking any further action.

If you think about what happened here, you begin to understand the shock and trauma these local citizens must have undergone. They were engaging in the kind of spontaneous local political activity that is a sign of a healthy democratic system and one that we should encourage. Yet they were subjected to investigation by a federal law enforcement agency and could have been forced to pay a civil penalty for their behavior. The admonishment letter would be a federal law enforcement agency’s statement that these ordinary citizens had violated federal law, not something most people take lightly. Even if you think that disclaimers in political advertising are a good idea, the fact that the statute contains no minimum threshold of activity for its application leaves individual citizens who engage in political speech at the mercy of the FEC.

Besides the disclaimer problem, if you decide to put a homemade political sign in your front yard or take out an advertisement in your local neighborhood newspaper expressing your belief that John McCain should be elected president, you’d better not spend more than $250. If you do, you are required by federal law to register with the FEC and report your independent political expenditures. Think it won’t happen?

You might want to talk to Kirk Shelmerdine, former crew chief for Dale Earnhardt, who races in NASCAR as a field-filler. In 2004 he couldn’t sell advertising on one panel of his car, so he committed the terrible federal crime of putting a Bush/Cheney decal on it. Horror of horrors — he did not report the “value” of that decal to the FEC, thus violating the independent expenditure reporting requirement. After an extensive investigation, the FEC got into a convoluted internal argument about what the value of that decal placement was, i.e., how much would Mr. Shelmerdine have to pay himself to purchase the unsold advertising space on his own car and how much was that worth in the various races he participated in.

In a four-to-one vote — I cast the dissenting vote — the commission decided to send Shelmerdine a letter of admonishment that he had violated federal law for not reporting putting a decal on his own car. No telling how much he spent in attorneys’ fees — and his own time — in responding to this silly investigation.

Reformers argue that these rules and others are needed to prevent “corruption” in our political process. It is absurd to contend that a decal on a racing car or a homemade political sign has the potential to “corrupt” a federal candidate or create the “appearance of corruption” if it went unreported to the FEC. Yet there are all sorts of independent political activities by ordinary citizens — people who have no connection with candidates or political campaigns — that are regulated and restricted by federal law. These two cases illustrate the intrusiveness and overreach of the federal campaign finance law into the lives of ordinary Americans.

http://reason.com/archives/2009/04/01/felonious-advocacy

Scalia's discombobulation was understandable, given that Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart had just claimed the First Amendment does not bar the government from telling interest groups what videos they may post online or what books they may publish. Such are the lengths to which Congress will be driven if it persists in its vain crusade to prevent "the appearance of corruption" by policing political speech.

The immediate issue before the Supreme Court is a 90-minute documentary, Hillary: The Movie, produced by the conservative group Citizens United, which wanted to make it available last year through video-on-demand cable channels. The cost of doing so, in addition to $1.2 million for cable system access, was a penalty of up to five years in prison.

According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the documentary qualified as an illegal "electioneering communication" under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. That law prohibits corporations, including nonprofits like Citizens United, from sponsoring "any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication" that mentions a candidate for federal office within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election.

...

The implication is that a more evenhanded documentary, one that had some nice things to say about Clinton, would have been legal. Show a movie that tells a politician's story in a neutral way (as judged by the FEC's censors), and you're OK. Show a movie that makes the politician look bad, and you can go to prison. What was that constitutional provision Scalia mentioned?

Members of Congress evidently had at least a vague memory of it when they passed BCRA, because the law includes an exemption for "a communication appearing in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station." This provision perpetuates the dangerously misguided notion that certain citizens—in this case, those who work for a TV or radio station—have a special claim to freedom of speech.

 

[INRM]

If corporations are considered people, and their speech be measured in the form of money, it would defeat democracy. We'd end up an oligarchy or a plutocracy where the rich, powerful, and influential rule the country rather than the people, who, not having as much money would not have anywhere near as much say.

The rich powerful companies would always get their way and the people would get screwed every time.

The reason we have a constitution is to protect ourselves from the abuse of government power.

The reason why there are restrictions in corporate influence in elections is to protect the ourselves from the abuse of corporate power.

I'm not saying I'm opposed to corporations, I'm opposed to them having excessive influence in elections.


INRM

 

[leftysergeant]

If I recall correctly, the Supreme Court did not specifically rule that Corporations are people, the guy who read the ruling said it did and that was what was written down and that became law

And, if you read the fulldocument, the court specificly refused to hear arguements based on the personhood of corporation. I can, therefore, not understand how it could possibly be interpreted to mean that such a decision had been entered, thus that corporate personhood is stare decisus.

 

[INRM]

LeftySergeant,

And yet Corporations are considered people

 

[Dancing David]

Not really, that is rhetoric, the SCOTUS will have a lot of deliberation and consideration.

There should be many great arguments on both sides. And this is also where the three recent judges are wild cards, their behavior is unpredictable at this point.

There will be arguments like:
1. Should a foreign national be allowed to give as much campaign money to whoever they wish?
2. Were other remedies available?
3. Is money speech?

and most impotatntly:
0. What exactly are the facts and the scope of the case before the court.