Citizens United

The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Committee is seen by many as the cornerstone of the monstrosity that is the notion of Corporate Personhood. In truth it is simply the corporate lobby’s most powerful instrument. It is built on a foundation that teeters precariously on a twisted mis-statement  of the intentions of the 14th Amendment and a choice by a small state court to act on the notion that the theory of natural and non-natural persons would automatically be carried over from British common law.

Additionally the final decision in the case which stated that the First Amendment  prohibits government from censoring political broadcasts in candidate elections when those broadcasts are funded by corporations or unions was passed by a 5 to 4 margin which includes the concurring opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas whose own conflict of interest was painfully obvious as his household stood to make hundreds of thousands of dollars via his wife’s role as CEO of Liberty Central, a 501(c)(4) organization that stood to benefit from Justice Thomas’ decision.

The fallacies and implications of the Citizens United are many and alarming. They all sit in direct opposition to the nature of representative democracy. Perhaps Justice Stevens said it best in concluding his dissenting opinion:
“At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”