I don't believe the Founding Fathers would support Corporations over the 1 st amendment.
Early USA history was a lot stricter on corporate charters.
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history-corporations-us/
Initially, the privilege of incorporation was granted selectively to enable activities that benefited the public, such as construction of roads or canals. Enabling shareholders to profit was seen as a means to that end. The states also imposed conditions (some of which remain on the books, though unused) like these*:
Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws.
Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.
Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose.
Corporations were often terminated if they exceeded their authority or caused public harm.
Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts committed on the job.
Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.
For 100 years after the American Revolution, legislators maintained tight control of the corporate chartering process. Because of widespread public opposition, early legislators granted very few corporate charters, and only after debate. Citizens governed corporations by detailing operating conditions not just in charters but also in state constitutions and state laws. Incorporated businesses were prohibited from taking any action that legislators did not specifically allow.
https://hbr.org/2010/04/what-the-founding-fathers-real.html
We don’t really begin to see economic enterprises chartered as corporations until the 1790s. Some are banks, others are companies that were going to build canals, turnpikes, and bridges — infrastructure projects that states did not have the money to build themselves. Citizens petitioned legislators for a corporate charter, and if a critical mass of political pressure could build in a capital, they got an act of incorporation. It specified their capitalization limitations, limited their lifespan, and dictated the boundaries of their operations and functions.
I should add, too, that as part of this effort to democratize corporations, state charters specifically spelled out how shareholder elections were to be conducted to choose directors. Corporations were supposed to resemble small republics, with directors balancing interests among shareholders. When they printed material or conducted correspondence, it was usually in the name of the “President, Directors, and Shareholders of the X Company.”
A couple months ago the Supreme Court ruled that restricting corporate political spending amounted to restricting free speech. In this view, corporations are pretty much equivalent to people. Would that have seemed reasonable to the Founding Fathers?
In a word, no.
I read this opinion carefully — I’m trained as a historian, not a lawyer. Chief Justice Roberts lays out an ideologically pure view of corporations as associations of citizens — leveling differences between companies, schools and other groups. So in his view Boeing is no different from Harvard, which is no different from the NAACP, or Citizens United, or my local neighborhood civic association. It’s lovely prose, but as a matter of history the majority is simply wrong.
Let me put it this way: the Founders did not confuse Boston’s Sons of Liberty with the British East India Company. They could distinguish among different varieties of association — and they understood that corporate personhood was a legal fiction that was limited to a courtroom. It wasn’t literal. Corporations could not vote or hold office. They held property, and to enable a shifting group of shareholders to hold that property over time and to sue and be sued in court, they were granted this fictive personhood in a limited legal context.
Early Americans had a far more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of corporations than the Court gives them credit for. They were much more comfortable with retaining pre-Revolutionary city or school charters than with creating new corporations that would concentrate economic and political power in potentially unaccountable institutions. When you read Madison in particular, you see that he wasn’t blindly hostile to banks during his fight with Alexander Hamilton over the Bank of the United States. Instead, he’s worried about the unchecked power of accumulations of capital that come with creating a class of bankers.
