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The idea that a company is an oppressed person is silly enough to entertain a 4-year-old. Imagine a corporation asking for the right to adopt children or marry your sister. I envision a skyscraper demanding to sit wherever it wants on a bus.
But a recent Supreme Court ruling has unleased a multi-headed dragon: the corporate person. The ruling enforces the idea of corporations as legal persons rather than a project of the people who run them. It lifts restrictions on election-year advertising in the name of free speech. Literally speaking, a corporation cannot speak — but it can spend money. According to the court, there’s no difference.
Until last week, corporations with a political stance would channel money into highly regulated political action committees (PACs). These PACs were semi-autonomous and had numerous regulations dictating how they could operate.
Imagine a company that sells equipment to torture endangered birds. It creates a PAC, obscuring its intent behind a name like “Citizens for Protecting Animal Access Freedom.” The PAC would then run “advocacy ads.” If you were awake in 2008, you’ve seen them. These advertisements take an agenda – like laws to prevent the torture of spotted owls – and reframe it as a common-sense issue, such as “keeping big government out of our personal experiences with nature.” They then runs ads against the anti-owl-torture position of a candidate, telling you to “contact them” to voice your opposition.
This process was a mess with questionable benefits — but with the new court ruling, companies can spend infinite dollars producing and broadcasting ads for or against specific candidates. This system is open to abuse as candidates rely on big businesses to support them with clear expectations of payback.
More troubling is the scope of the court’s decision. American law has many distinctions regulating fair elections. Under the old rules, for example, foreigners couldn’t contribute. Justice Stevens, who opposed the ruling, pointed out that non-citizens who run a company on U.S. soil can now contribute heartily. If China wants to open a PRC Concrete Inc. branch in Detroit, it could contribute billions to “advertising” for American Mao Zedong Thought Party candidates in the farmlands of Michigan.
By protecting corporate spending, this decision gives more rights to corporations than to certain types of actual people: A 1974 case ruled that a soldier could not advocate for civil disobedience on military bases. A 1986 case ruled that a teenager running for student government did not have the right to make explicit sexual overtures in a campaign speech. If we have laws limiting free speech for soldiers and high school students, why wouldn’t we restrict corporations?
The court provided two reasons. Both are flawed.
First, the court ruled that by limiting corporate speech, we limit the rights of board members. But no law banned CEOs from political expression – executives can share opinions with their own money. The corporation is simply a tool used to earn income. By giving CEOs a distinct set of rights explicitly tied to their use of that tool, the court seems to allow farmers to speak on behalf of their horses.
Second, the court ruled that since corporations will use profits collected from a supportive public, they have a right to influence elections. But the public supports a corporation because it makes a better kind of hair dryer – not because it supports laws to expand the profit margin on hair dryers. To assume the free market is influenced by a corporation’s political stance defies the notion of rational spending – and turns the grocery store into a political caucus.
None of this serves America well. As Justice Stevens ended his dissenting opinion, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
But as the ruling of the highest court, we are stuck with it, unless Congress drafts a new set of laws limiting corporate influence while respecting corporate rights.
Eryk Salvaggio is a senior journalism and new media student.
