DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - Landmark Supreme Court ruling allows corporate political cash

**cajonnmu** · 01-24-2010, 05:40 PM

As an oblique response to the two previous posts let me say that I think resonable arguments can be made for both sides of the issue: so I can not completely refute any ones position as simply WRONG.

I am being a absolutest regarding constitutional interpretation in my agreement with the majority opinion: a simple constitutional constructivist position. And, all remarks regarding ‘personhood’ and ‘money equals speech’ are not at issue: there was not a disagreement between (any) of the chief justices on those particular matters.

The only thing I can say for sure is that a ‘constitutional constructivist’ will generally be in agreement with the majority chief justice decision.

And again - "The idea that a corporation and a person have the same rights" was taken as a given by ALL the supreme court justices: why even bring that up in this context.
A quote from Glenn Greenwald
More important, I want to note one extremely bizarre aspect to the discussion. Most commenters (though not all) grounded their opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling in two rather absolute principles: (1) corporations are not "persons" and thus have no First Amendment/free speech rights and/or (2) money is not speech, and therefore restrictions on how money is spent cannot violate the First Amendment's free speech clause. What makes those arguments so bizarre is that none of the 9 Justices -- including the 4 dissenting Justices -- argued either of those propositions or believe them. To the contrary, all 9 Justices -- including the 4 in dissent -- agreed that corporations do have First Amendment rights and that restricting how money can be spent in pursuit of political advocacy does trigger First Amendment protections. Here's what Justice Stevens himself said in his dissent (p. 54-55):

01-24-2010, 05:40 PM	#22
cajonnmu Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 507 Senior Member	As an oblique response to the two previous posts let me say that I think resonable arguments can be made for both sides of the issue: so I can not completely refute any ones position as simply WRONG. I am being a absolutest regarding constitutional interpretation in my agreement with the majority opinion: a simple constitutional constructivist position. And, all remarks regarding ‘personhood’ and ‘money equals speech’ are not at issue: there was not a disagreement between (any) of the chief justices on those particular matters. The only thing I can say for sure is that a ‘constitutional constructivist’ will generally be in agreement with the majority chief justice decision. And again - "The idea that a corporation and a person have the same rights" was taken as a given by ALL the supreme court justices: why even bring that up in this context. A quote from Glenn Greenwald More important, I want to note one extremely bizarre aspect to the discussion. Most commenters (though not all) grounded their opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling in two rather absolute principles: (1) corporations are not "persons" and thus have no First Amendment/free speech rights and/or (2) money is not speech, and therefore restrictions on how money is spent cannot violate the First Amendment's free speech clause. What makes those arguments so bizarre is that none of the 9 Justices -- including the 4 dissenting Justices -- argued either of those propositions or believe them. To the contrary, all 9 Justices -- including the 4 in dissent -- agreed that corporations do have First Amendment rights and that restricting how money can be spent in pursuit of political advocacy does trigger First Amendment protections. Here's what Justice Stevens himself said in his dissent (p. 54-55):
	Quote