“Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”
Corruption Will Go Up and Self-Government Will Be At Risk
“In a functioning democracy the public must have faith that its representatives owe their positions to the people, not to the corporations with the deepest pockets.”
The majority opinion insisted that restricting corporate political speech was justified only in cases of quid pro quo corruption. Stevens’s response to this was blistering: “The approach taken by the majority cannot be right, in my judgment. It disregards our constitutional history and the fundamental demands of a democratic society.
The Framers Favored Regulating Corporations
The Voices of Actual Citizens Will Be Drowned Out
Cynicism Will Increase
“The Framers thus took it as a given that corporation could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.
Justice Stevens, in a footnote, also unearthed this resonant quote from Thomas Jefferson:
“I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by Cinnabar
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Justice Stevens’s Dissent in Citizens United Lives On!
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