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Anathos117 t1_j5r5ots wrote

Reply to comment by Krasmaniandevil in On Whether “Personhood” is a Normative or Descriptive Concept by ADefiniteDescription

> However, I would say that describing a corporation as an association of natural persons is just a theory of "corporate personhood" by another name.

I wouldn't. Think about it this way: what if you wanted to put out a political ad? You obviously don't have enough money yourself. But if you and 10,000 of your closest friends pooled your money, you could. But how do you store all that money while you're collecting it? How do you spend it? If you give it to Fred no strings attached, there's nothing stopping Fred from keeping the money for himself. So you need some mechanism that gives Fred conditional access to the money so he can only spend it on the political ad. We call that mechanism a "corporation".

Citizens United recognized that the only practical way for people to engage in certain exercises of their rights was collectively, so restrictions on corporations specifically formed for political purposes were necessarily infringements on the rights of individuals.

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Krasmaniandevil t1_j5r7lmt wrote

That's how I originally thought the court would rule. A decision that permits aggregating small donations while rejecting unlimited donations from for-profit entities was floated by the FEC and explicitly rejected by the court. In other words, SCOTUS explicitly rejected a decision that would allow for your hypo but would restrict unlimited donations from for-profit companies. (Read section II D of the opinion, I don't have pincites).

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Anathos117 t1_j5ra9w6 wrote

Did you actually read the argument though? The alternatives available to the Supreme Court were to strike down so many laws and rulings that for-profit companies could directly engage in electioneering, or carve out an exemption so conditional that it effectively wouldn't be useful for anyone else, therefore infringing on rights it shouldn't. And the Court couldn't find against Citizens United after the FEC made clear that they believed they could and would censor political books in the wake of such a decision.

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Krasmaniandevil t1_j5rd56y wrote

I believe that a conditional exemption would have been consistent with judicial minimalism, stare decisis, and deference to a coequal branch.

Personally, I think Citizen's United is an intentionally overbroad ruling that's predicated on creating a false choice and erring on the side of our corporate overlords (look at their waiver analysis and tell me it's applied the same way in other cases).

I also think they entirely devalued the interests in actual corruption, perceived corruption, and foreign interference.

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Anathos117 t1_j5rdsaq wrote

> Personally, I think Citizen's United is an intentionally overbroad ruling that's predicated on creating a false choice and erring on the side of our corporate overlords (look at their waiver analysis and tell me it's applied the same way in other cases).

That's a far different statement than your original claim that "Corporate personhood is a legal fiction, or at least it was until Citizens United..."

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Krasmaniandevil t1_j5rfajm wrote

My argument: Citizens United characterized corporations as "associations of citizens" to reach a result that is functionally equivalent to saying corporations have 1A rights so long as they use a third party entity. This holding was not dictated by precedent, and the court consciously rejected an approach that would have adjudicated the question in Citizen's United's favor on narrower grounds without doing violence to the primary purpose of the statute(s) in question.

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