Resolved: In political campaigns within the United States, corporations ought to be afforded the same First Amendment free speech protections as individuals.
I have mixed feelings about this one. My initial reaction was a sigh due to Citizens United overload, but I wonder if I was a bit preemptive. If you don’t feel the same way, then maybe this is a good candidate for Jan-Feb. Perhaps even if you do feel the same, it’s a good candidate. Certainly the issue is important. I just wonder how much one can say about it. Is there enough there to support not just two but four months of debate? Even my own thoughts are just mostly ramblings. I don’t have anything really definitive to say, as you’ll soon see.
Citizens United is, of course, the case where the Supreme Court decided that corporations did have this political right. Which decision, of course, means nothing on the scale of “ought”—“SCOTUS says so” hasn’t carried much moral weight since, I don’t know, Judge Taney?—but which is why this topic is on the list in the first place. It is hot, and important, and there is a body of literature on it now, from both sides, to support plenty of argumentation. But as I say, I wonder how limited the scope of the sides will be. How much good argumentation is there?
Free speech in the US is a civil right, explained in the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It is probably a good idea to remember that the framers had recently fought a war for independence, and that their freedom to speak freely was a direct issue in allowing that war to happen. In other words, they had recently had a horse in the race, so the idea of freedom of speech was not simply philosophical. The grammatical connection of speech and the press in the same phrase is also telling; freedom of the press was considered important as a check on government, just as individual free speech was considered a check on government. Our idea of free speech has expanded over time to now, in many of our minds, meaning simply the freedom to say and think what we want, absent its effect on the operation/control of government. We do have a few limits to speech, like slander and safety, but we are, legally, pretty tolerant. This is, I would say, a good thing. (Feel free to disagree. [That’s a joke.])
So our original conception of free speech was as check on the government, and our present conception of free speech is as self-expression. In the context of political campaigns, these two certainly tend to come together, as we contribute money to the politicians of our choice, or campaign for them, or whatever. We see this as well within our rights as individuals in a democracy, regardless of how big an idiot the person is we’re campaigning for. (In the immortal words of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” stupid people have rights too.)
Meanwhile, on a different track altogether we have the idea of corporations. For a variety of reasons, none of which are philosophical, corporations, as Wikipedia puts it, “are recognized to have rights and responsibilities like actual people.” That is, legally we treat them, if not as literal persons, often as meta-persons. They pay taxes, they can commit crimes, etc. Look up “legal personality.” There is no doubt that, since corporations exist in the real world, with real interests, they will have legitimate concerns over who gets elected to what. As far as the Supreme Court is concerned (i.e., the five activist conservatives who now rule that particular roost), this means that corporations ought to be afforded the full rights of any individual in getting their people elected. One problem with this is that, okay, Greedo, Inc., is a legal personality, but hell, it ain’t no person. Corporations have money and power (and concerns) that are far different from those of individuals, and therefore could have much more sway over elections than individuals. Additionally, since corporations are made up of individuals, there is the question of who that corporation is representing when it uses its power in an election. Its workers? Its stockholders? Its officers? These three groups may have similar interests, and may not.
Some of the complaints about the Citizens United decision is that it is political, playing into the desires of a political court to get their guys into office, since corporations, which love laissez faire and the least amount of government possible, will spend their efforts on conservatives of that stripe, which is, of course, the same stripe as those five activist judges. For all the so-called originalism of SCOTUS today, one doubts that the framers really believed that Greedo, Inc., ought to have the same clout as Jefferson’s essential republican farmer.
So the background to the discussion is a combination of free speech and corporate identity. But what are the arguments? That corporations aren’t individuals? Well, duh. Obviously the first thing I would do is pull out the opinions from the case and read those in detail, and then you can run through searches till the cows come home on both sides of the argument beyond the court. I have a feeling that this one will get chosen, and maybe for the big slot. I just don’t know if it’s good enough.
Here's some more grist: http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/will-elena-kagan-allow-books
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