U.S. Supreme Court gave us bad corporate medicine, two congressmen propose a remedy
Eric Hill
Opinion Editor
As an American citizen I have First Amendment rights allowing me a full range of political speech, protected in public places, print, radio, television and the internet. If I join a trade union, or an association or a company then I am in essence becoming a part of a larger entity that has the same fundamental rights. Yet the rights of an association or union of people are not derived for the organization, but for the sake of the people it encompases. A collection of people does not always carry the interests of all of the people and so, in the spirit of maintaining the marketplace of ideas, we limit the speech of some groups because they have disproportionate resources to the voices that they represent.
That last paragraph was true until the U.S Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United in its case against the Federal Elections Commission on Jan. 21. This overruled the limitations instituted by the McCain/Feingold ban that prevented corporate entities and labor or trade unions from creating issue-oriented ads within one month of a primary or two months of a general election. It also established the rule of law that allows those organizations to use money from general funds to create political advertisements. This ruling has overturned more than a century of precedent law.
If you aren’t aware, Citizens United was a political action group that attempted to broadcast a 90-minute anti-Hillary Clinton film during the 2008 democratic primary via on-demand cable programming and running commercials for the film on regular cable television. The Federal Election Commission extended campaign finance laws to the cable television commercials because they would be widely circulated. After viewing the trailer I can only say the film was intended to be an outright character assassination of Hillary Clinton. The subject of the film is beside the point though; this ruling has significantly altered the landscape of political advertising by shifting the paradigm of what First Amendment rights are awarded to a collected body of people.
This case has been mired in political language since the beginning of its admission into the court but I wish to speak plainly to evoke my reasoning for why it is a poor ruling. To those who would say that I am not speaking with fairness to corporate entities in regard to First Amendment rights: Any commentary about the opinions the founding fathers toward corporations are at best speculation because not a single one of them had any inkling of what a modern corporation was. As such I will abandon the premise that corporate entities are equal before the First Amendment as individual persons, and instead speak of their separate and distinct characters.
If a man commits a murder he may be put to death for the destruction of life, accidental or otherwise. If a corporation kills thousands of people by way of its products, its behavior or even intentionally producing weapons for the destruction of human lives, it will never be put to death, it can only be fined for reparations. If a man pulls a dollar out of his pocket and puts it toward a cause, he cannot pull a dollar from his friend’s pocket without his permission and declare that it shall replace that dollar on account that they are friends. A corporation can take the money of all of its component shareholders and spends it in any way it has determined to do so. A man can only speak for himself or those who give him permission to speak. A corporation can claim to speak for all of its human resources, yet its words will surely be decided by whomever contributes the most capital. Surely men and corporations are not the same, and their democratic rights should be evaluated in the light of their different characters.
The United States is a republic, not a democracy. In pure democracy each person is accorded the same measure of freedom and rights to vote. In a republic, everything is based on representatives being elected to vote for the public so that the public benefits. If a select number of organizations can influence the election of representatives by using financial resources to proclaim itself as “the public,” then the people of the United States will suffer from identity theft. The republic will change into a system where the greatest concentration of wealth determines the course of public policy instead of the greatest concentration of people. By allowing corporations to monopolize the market place of ideas with their opinions, the voices of truly fair representatives and policies will be drowned in the maelstrom of malevolent capitalists.
On Feb. 13, Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen have proposed a bill that will curtail the behavior of corporate entities and unions to use the Supreme Court ruling to affect elections unfettered. The proposed legislation includes barring any companies with more than 20 percent foreign ownership from running ads, constricts corporations from creating coordinated advertisements against specific candidates and requires that all shareholders be notified and informed about political advertisements.
While this legislation is a good first step to controlling the damage to our republic that this ruling admits, it is far from complete and will require significant political effort to muster our government to create a policy of fairness between corporations and individuals in election finance. In the end it may take a constitutional amendment to define the necessary roles that corporations and unions will be allowed to play in our future. Until that time comes, our country will be dealing with a stomach ache from the bad medicine administered by this Supreme Court, which goes to far in asserting what it believes our founding fathers would have concluded about a conflict of rights none of them witnessed.
