There is nothing in the Constitution about corporations at all. You’re inventing first amendment rights for Corporations out of whole cloth. Aren’t you?
And when I said the Court could distinguish, I mean they could distinguish the difference between Amex and the RNC or the DNC. One of them is an expression of freedom of assembly as intended in the first amendment, and one isn’t.
From my prior ninja edit:
That’s the whole reason why the Courts treat a corporation as a “person”, because that’s the language used in the constitution and therefore the only way to give any of them First Amendment rights.
Yes you can. There are laws about whether or not the campaign itself is allowed to coordinate its message with you (that is, if they produce an ad, then ask you to pay for it to be aired, or tell you what to put in the ad you produce), but that stuff also applies to corporations. You can make your own ads, from your own brain, and pay for them with your own money, just like a corporation can. The only difference is that you probably don’t have as much money.
Yes, you’re right. Thanks for correction.
A minor point here:
What you’re describing isn’t the reason why the courts treat a corporation as a person, it’s the effect that the policy has.
I believe that in terms of constitutional law, the reason why corporations are treated like people in certain cases, is that to do otherwise would be to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights when they act collectively. That is, you and I both have certain rights. If we organize together, we shouldn’t suddenly lose those rights. It kind of grows out of the right of association.
The First Amendment prohibits the government from suppressing speech. Private parties can make whatever arrangements they like. Your examples are no different than an NDA.
That’s kind of like asking whether a right to free speech means a right to be heard. It doesn’t.
Corporate action (and here I use the term broadly for “people doing stuff together”) seems like a fairly big gap in the framework of the Constitution, actually. Probably because the Enlightenment seemed to think that there are people in a State of Nature, and then there are States, without giving much thought to other kinds of Leviathan.
Then it’s useless.
No, it’s not. You are born with a right to free speech, but you must earn an audience.
This is the argument offered for it, but in fact corporations don’t all act collectively in that sense at all. Corporations are run by a handful of people, and it is they who are acting, not any larger collective. Since it is also argued that money is speech, you can look at a corporation like Planned Parenthood or Citizens United and argue that people have given their money for a specific purpose and therefore there is collective action, but that breaks down as soon as you look at any conventional for-profit corporation. Most people who own shares in a company do so by having bought those shares from someone else, and have effectively given no money at all to the corporation. Even if the have, almost no one with shares in a corporation has any ability to direct the activities of a corporation. From a Constitutional standpoint, corporations mostly aren’t collections of people acting in ways so as to inherit the individual rights of their shareholders.
This parses to: A Court wanted to find that corporations had first amendment rights, so a Court decided to pretend they were people in order to get that result. Because the Court pretended they were people, then that means they have first amendment rights. Is that what you meant, or am I misunderstanding you?
Fair enough. Giving the DNC the right to free speech is not the reason for corporate personhood. But corporate personhood is the reason the DNC has a right to free speech.
But we aren’t talking about earning an audience, we are talking about not having my speech suppressed by the powers that be. If my rights exist only relative to the Feds, then we need a new bill of rights that protects me from other groups of people.
The Constitution says nothing about a right to make or sell guns, yet the court seems to believe that right should be protected.
I disagree. The DNC is an assembly of people for political purposes; that’s what gives the DNC first amendment rights.
I’m still looking for an argument for why individual campaign contributions can be limited under the Constitution, but political spending by corporations can’t. You have to admit that’s a weird result.
What suppression are we talking about here?
They do, and always have.
Good luck.
Well, in the abstract I’m talking about the defacto suppression of individual speech caused by crowding-out when those with large resources suck up the oxygen. We could probably get into specifics, but essentially it boils down to whether or not giving me the right to donate money to Planned Parenthood is the same as giving me free speech, when donating to larger organizations is the only way I could possibly afford to speak.
That’s not true, either in detail (the 14th amendment protects me against States, for example) or in spirit (Congress makes many laws defending people’s rights against other people), and the Court has frequently upheld the idea that the protection of vulnerable groups or of the State itself takes precedence over even the enumerated rights. For example, would you agree that the government has the authority to limit the scope of NDAs?
The Constitution protects the right to peacefully assemble. End of clause. It does not have to be for political purposes, in fact the clause has been used to protect motorcycle gangs.
If the DNC is a “peaceful assembly”, then so is AT&T.
It is indeed weird and wrong.
I think this is the part of your logic which is in error.
As Magnet said, speech does not imply an audience. If you cannot afford to get your message out beyond standing on a streetcorner and yelling, that’s immaterial from the perspective of your rights. You merely have the right to express yourself within your means… you do not have the right to have means of expression provided to you.
You are free to expend whatever resources you choose to express your opinions, and that expenditure cannot be infringed upon by the government. But no one owes any assistance to you in regard to enabling that expression. No one is obligated to print your messages, or produce commercials for you, or give you airtime.
I believe that there are some laws that require equal access to certain types of media, in the form of guaranteeing that you can purchase advertising time/space at the same price as everyone else, but this isn’t a constitutional issue. It’s merely some other kind of law, I think.