If you had control of the USSC, what case would you overturn?

And if violated the free speech of those who produced and presented it. Why should free speech be curtailed because of some arbitrary anti-free speech law passed by government?

 

Griswold vs Connecticut

 

No, corporations are made up of people. A corporation is not a person in itself. A corporation is a construct. Do you think Wal-Mart the corporation went walking up a Congress critter and said "hey, I think this should happen...."? Of course not. Because its a construct. Do you think Microsoft CEO's went around to its employee's asking how they should spend Microsoft's money? No, of course not. CEO's look out for their own interest.

 

YES a corporation is made up of people, it is PEOPLE. And under the law there is no difference between a person and a corporation. It is the first provision of our law.

1 U.S. Code § 1 - Words denoting number, gender, and so forth

...the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/1

And yes Walmart engages with government at all levels.

The corporation is the OWNERS, all the people who INVEST in the corporation not the employees. The employees are mere hired hands, an expense to the corporation. The CEO is not the corporation, they are hired hands who work for the owners.

 

And the law is WRONG. Hence all those, in this thread-- which asks, hypothetically, what decision we would reverse, if we had the power to do so-- choosing the Citizens United boner, which I commend as a good choice. It also makes for interesting thread reading because, unlike so many other threads in which opinion runs basically along one of two basic lines, there are so many nuances in the ways people see this issue, that it makes strange bedfellows, and pits members who seem typically to be on the same side, in debates, in rarely-seen clashes. But when you find out what case I'm choosing, Bluesguy, it's going to incense you way worse, I predict.

While I'm on this case, though, I'll say my opinion is that corporations cannot be the equal of persons, cannot have all the same legal rights because, in practice, they do not face all the same legal consequences, remedies prescribed to ordinary citizens who commit the same crimes. When a, "corporation's," negligence, for example, leads to others' deaths-- something that would typically result in real prison time, for a person, a corporation generally just pays a fine, normally only a fraction of the profit it made off of the unsafe product. An actual person, when caught in wrong doing, cannot escape accountability by shifting blame around within their decision-making structure, etc.

And, while I will go along with the idea of money being in some ways, comparable to speech, it is only with the reservation that, unlike true vocalization, or written words, which we all can wield, albeit w/ differing levels of ability, money is a very unevenly distributed resource. This means, unlike two people who are on essentially even footing, each trying to make their case, to a crowd, hopefully resulting in the sounder thinking, winning the day, a corporation's financial resources effectively renders any individual citizen's free speech, impotent, feckless, meaningless, & nullified. So I am most closely in accord w/ David Landbrecht, on this issue:

Now, this is what I was talking about: Flynn from Az does not see merit in the argument that corporations, "aren't people," however nor does he accept the argument, on the other side, that money equals free speech. Actually, when I say it like that, it does seem an oxymoron that whoever has more money should get more of something that is, supposedly, free.

I would be curious to understand in what way he sees this as "tone deaf to the function of the constitution," but I couldn't agree more with his ending summation, and analysis.

KalStang, on the other hand, does see money as speech, but does not accept the notion that corporations are people. Regardless, they both come out on the same side of that ruling, along w/ D. Landbrecht, & myself (among others, I'm sure).

But if we all have an equal right to free speech, and money is speech, couldn't some future, very liberal Court, use that as a rationale for equal distribution of wealth?

Just kidding (I hope that doesn't give you nightmares).

 

I'm a little bit surprised that this hasn't been mentioned-- and would have been, even before I just read that this is roundly considered one of the worst SCOTUS decisions, ever: both dead-wrong, as well as a huge overstepping. But if I could change one ruling, though it certainly isn't clear what the long-term repercussions of the resultant change would be, I would roll the dice on the Dred Scott v. Sanford case. The reason, of course, is the hope that this might have led to a more amicable, ultimate settling of the slavery question, reflected today in the feelings among Americans of all races, and in all regions of the country (though, who knows if that change would have made more likely a political division, rather than a military re-gluing, of our fractured nation). Perhaps a peaceful solution wasn't possible; a different ruling may have only precipitated the coming conflict, more swiftly. Though, with Buchanan in the White House, it's hard to say. Though he was a Democrat (which was the stronger Southern, and so more pro-slavery, Party, back then), he was still in favor of preserving the Union, but did not have Lincoln's resolve, in this regard. I guess we'll never know, for sure. Here's a SNIP from Whitehouse.gov:

As President-elect, Buchanan thought the crisis would disappear if he maintained a sectional balance in his appointments and could persuade the people to accept constitutional law as the Supreme Court interpreted it. The Court was considering the legality of restricting slavery in the territories, and two justices hinted to Buchanan what the decision would be.

Thus, in his Inaugural the President referred to the territorial question as “happily, a matter of but little practical importance” since the Supreme Court was about to settle it “speedily and finally.”

Two days later Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the Dred Scott decision, asserting that Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights in slaves in the territories. Southerners were delighted, but the decision created a furor in the North.

When Republicans won a plurality in the House in 1858, every significant bill they passed fell before southern votes in the Senate or a Presidential veto. The Federal Government reached a stalemate.

Sectional strife rose to such a pitch in 1860 that the Democratic Party split into northern and southern wings, each nominating its own candidate for the Presidency. Consequently, when the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, it was a foregone conclusion that he would be elected even though his name appeared on no southern ballot. Rather than accept a Republican administration, the southern “fire-eaters” advocated secession.

President Buchanan, dismayed and hesitant, denied the legal right of states to secede but held that the Federal Government legally could not prevent them. He hoped for compromise, but secessionist leaders did not want compromise.

Then Buchanan took a more militant tack. As several Cabinet members resigned, he appointed northerners, and sent the Star of the West to carry reinforcements to Fort Sumter. On January 9, 1861, the vessel was far away.

Buchanan reverted to a policy of inactivity that continued until he left office. In March 1861 he retired to his Pennsylvania home Wheatland–where he died seven years later–leaving his successor to resolve the frightful issue facing the Nation.

<END SNIP>

Anyway, the actual case, & especially the history behind it, is more interesting than I'd realized. For example, even though he lost the case, because his widowed owner married a Northern abolitionist politician (and Dred Scott was the most infamous slave in the country), he was quickly sold to his former owner's family, who soon gave him his freedom, anyway. Unfortunately, he died a year later, from tuberculosis.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Dred-Scott-decision

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/black-history/dred-scott-case

From history.com:
<SNIP>

Chief Justice Roger Taney
Roger Taney was born into the southern aristocracy and became the fifth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Taney became best known for writing the final majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which said that all people of African descent, free or enslaved, were not United States citizens and therefore had no right to sue in federal court. In addition, he wrote that the Fifth Amendment protected slave owner rights because enslaved workers were their legal property.

The decision also argued that the Missouri Compromise legislation — passed to balance the power between slave and non-slave states — was unconstitutional. In effect, this meant that Congress had no power to prevent the spread of slavery.

Despite Taney’s long tenure as a Supreme Court justice, people vilified him for his role in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. In an ironic historical footnote, Taney would later swear in Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," as president of the United States in 1861.
<END SNIP>

From Brittanica
<SNIP>

The decision
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s opinion for the court was arguably the worst he ever wrote. He ignored precedent, distorted history, imposed a rigid rather than a flexible construction on the Constitution, ignored specific grants of power in the Constitution, and tortured meanings out of other, more-obscure clauses. His logic on the citizenship issue was perhaps the most convoluted. He admitted that African Americans could be citizens of a particular state and that they might even be able to vote, as they in fact did in some states. But he argued that state citizenship had nothing to do with national citizenship and that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States. Scott’s suit, therefore, should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction by the district court. On this point, however, Taney stood on shaky constitutional ground: if even one state considered an African American a citizen, then the Constitution required that all states, and by inference also the federal government, had to accord that person “all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” (Article IV, Section 2), which includes the right to sue in federal court. Furthermore, Article III, which establishes the jurisdiction of the federal courts, does not mention national citizenship but rather declares that “the judicial Power” shall extend, among other things, “to Controversies…between Citizens of different States” (the so-called “diversity jurisdiction”).


Even with this weak argument, Taney could have been accused of nothing worse than faulty reasoning, if he had stopped there. If Scott was not a U.S. citizen, he could not sue in federal court, and the case would therefore have been improvidently granted. But Taney was determined to impose a judicial solution on the slavery controversy. Although later courts would adopt the policy of deciding constitutional questions on the narrowest possible grounds, the pre-Civil War courts often decided all issues that could support their rulings. Thus Taney continued, holding that Scott had never been free and that Congress had in fact exceeded its authority in the Missouri Compromise because it had no power to forbid or abolish slavery in the territories. The Missouri Compromise, which had served as the accepted constitutional settlement for nearly four decades, thus fell. Even the doctrine of popular sovereignty as articulated in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)—whereby the people of each federal territory would have the power to decide whether the territory would enter the Union as a free or a slave state—lacked constitutional legitimacy, according to Taney. He thus voided the principles of free soil (opposition to slavery in the territories and in newly admitted states), territorial sovereignty, and indeed every aspect of antislavery constitutional thought.

Regarding the question of Scott’s freedom, Taney held that Scott could not claim to be free on the basis of his residence in Illinois or Wisconsin. Whatever status Scott might have had while in a free state or territory, he argued, once he had returned to Missouri his status depended entirely on local law, notwithstanding the doctrine of once free, always free.

Taney would have been on reasonably strong ground had he limited himself to upholding the district court’s decision based on the idea that status was to be determined by the states. Alternatively, he could have held that Scott was not entitled to sue Sanford in federal court on the basis of diversity of jurisdiction, because Missouri did not allow even free African Americans to be citizens. But Taney outraged much of the North by asserting that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States. The framers, in his view, did not regard African Americans as being among the “people” for whose benefit and protection the new government was founded, notwithstanding the perfectly general language of the Declaration of Independence and of the preamble to the Constitution.

 

Brilliant argument!

EVERYONE has the RIGHT to FREEDOM of expression so by the SCrOTUS equating money to speech that means that everyone has the RIGHT to as much money as they can claim for themselves.

That argument alone NEGATES Citizens United because NONE of the Elite 1% are ever going to want EVERYONE to have an EQUAL amount of money to themselves.

 

What is the point of people refusing to recognize the definition of "person" that applies?
There are two categories of "persons"; 'legal persons' and 'real persons'. People are real persons. Corporations and such are 'legal persons', but absolutely not people and not treated as such.

 

There was a little bit more I wanted to include, from Britannica.com, about both the case & the response to Chief Justice Taney's decision (Dred Scott v. Sanford). Note, the case was originally misspelled Sanford, as, "Sandford."
<SNIP>

Among constitutional scholars, Scott v.
Sandford is widely considered the worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court. It has been cited in particular as the most egregious example in the court’s history of wrongly imposing a judicial solution on a political problem. A later chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes, famously characterized the decision as the court’s great “self-inflicted wound...”

Although the case was long thought to have been unusual, historians later demonstrated that several hundred suits for freedom were filed by or on behalf of slaves in the decades before the Civil War...

In 1850 the state court declared Scott free, but the verdict was reversed in 1852 by the Missouri Supreme Court (which thereby invalidated Missouri’s long-standing doctrine of “once free, always free”). Emerson’s widow then left Missouri and gave control of her late husband’s estate to her brother, John F.A. Sanford, a resident of New York state... Because Sanford was not subject to suit in Missouri, Scott’s lawyers filed a suit against him in U.S. district (federal) court, which found in Sanford’s favour. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which announced its decision in March 1857, just two days after the inauguration of Pres. James Buchanan...


Two justices, John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts, wrote devastating critiques of Taney’s opinion. Curtis in particular undercut most of Taney’s historical arguments, showing that African Americans had voted in a number of states at the founding. “At the time of the ratification of the Articles of Confederation,” he wrote:

All free native-born inhabitants of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina, though descended from African slaves, were not only citizens of those States, but such of them as had the other necessary qualifications possessed the franchise of electors, on equal terms with other citizens.

Thus, Curtis argued, they were members of the nation and could not now be denied the right to claim citizenship.

Reception and significance
“The Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery,” trumpeted one Georgia newspaper, “is now the supreme law of the land,” and opposition to it is “morally treason against the Government.” The view that Southern ideologues such as John C. Calhoun had promoted for more than a decade—that the federal government had a positive, indeed a constitutional, obligation to defend slavery—had apparently triumphed.

Not surprisingly, the North exploded in denunciations of Taney’s opinion. Several sober appraisals in the Northern press decimated the chief justice’s tortured legal reasoning. The Republican editor Horace Greeley published Justice Curtis’s dissent as a pamphlet to be used in the elections of 1858 and 1860. The press and pulpit echoed with attacks on the decision that were as heated as Southern defenses of it. Taney’s hopes of settling the issue lay smashed. If anything, Scott v. Sandford inflamed passions and brought the Union even closer to dissolving.

For all practical purposes, Northern courts and politicians rejected Scott v. Sandford as binding. In an advisory opinion, Maine’s high court declared that African Americans could vote in both state and federal elections. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that any slave coming into the state with his master’s consent, even as a sojourner, became free and could not be reenslaved upon returning to a slave state; the New York Court of Appeals handed down a similar ruling in Lemmon v. The People (1860). In several states, legislatures resolved to prohibit slavery in any form from crossing onto their soil and enacted legislation freeing slaves passing within their borders...

 

A law written by people who lobbied on behalf of corporations. No doubt those that voted for this law were paid rather handsomely for their votes in some way or another. Probably indirectly. The law once said that people could keep slaves also. Did that make it a Just law? Of course not. Just because something is law doesn't make it a Just law. Corporations are not people. They are run by people.

Ironically it is that designation by the way which gets Trump off the hook for any bad that the Trump Org. did...you realize that right? Its why the NY Prosecutors are going after the Org. and not Trump.

 

That is some twisted logic there.

 

Don't see why. Its like burning a flag which is considered free speech. Not everyone is going to buy a flag just to exercise their free speech. And no store is going to give them a flag for it either. Bullhorns are used for free speech. No one thinks that they are entitled to a bullhorn.

Oh sure, I wouldn't doubt that some leftist would try and use such an argument. They'd probably get laughed at and ignored though. The general populace isn't THAT stupid. And it would never make it to even a liberal court setting. They'll end up using some other excuse that is murky enough to try and pass such. Commerce Clause, taxation or some such more than likely. That's why Obamacare/ACA was passed anyways. "taxation" was the reasoning for accepting the mandate. Which of course was BS in itself as it wasn't a tax. It was a fine.

 

Not at all!

Per the SCrOTUS Citizens United decision Money = Speech.

The 1st Amendment gives us the RIGHT to FREE speech.

Ergo the SCrOTUS DECISION makes it a Constitutional RIGHT to have FREE money.

What we have NOW is that the MOST money equals the LOUDEST speech.

But that VIOLATES the concept of everyone being EQUAL under the Law of the Land.

So the OBVIOUS remedy is to NULLIFY Citizens United entirely BEFORE someone files a lawsuit that claims that their RIGHT to have an EQUAL amount of money as Bezos does is being VIOLATED under the Citizens United decision.

Then again filing that lawsuit would be a quick way to render the CU decision NULL and VOID because no court would uphold that claim. So by DENYING the claim the NEFARIOUS Citizens United decision goes into the law history books as one of the WORST decisions ever rendered by any court.

Roberts is going to be so THRILLED to have that on HIS record.

 

Not even going to bother with you until you learn how to type SCOTUS at the very least. Every time I see posts like this I roll my eyes at the ****** that is displayed.

 

NOT my problem that YOU are unable to REFUTE any of the LOGIC in my post.

Sad!

 

No amount of your attempt to marginalize and claim some nefarious plot and then TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP will change the fact that under our law there is no difference between a "person" and a "corporation". And the fact remains a corporation is PEOPLE engaged in their right to free assembly. Deal with it.

 

What crappy logic on display here.

 

Under the law they are and corporations are just a group of people. Without the people the corporation does not exist.

Again the very first provision of our US Code of laws states

1 U.S. Code § 1 - Words denoting number, gender, and so forth

...the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/1
That goes from there through our entire legal system and every law.

 

The LAW is the LAW as passed by the Congress not what you WISH it to be.

If a person in a corporation does something criminal which causes that death that person can be prosecuted. The corporate identity does not protect that person. And those fines are set by judges to recoup those profits in the settlements.

Again a corporation is merely a bunch of people engage in a joint economic venture or even a charitable or other non-profit cause. You do realize non-profits can and usually are corporations too.

 

It’s better to make a argument about the consequences of Citizens United, the whole Corporations not being people argument falls flat.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The constitution clearly states that government can’t pass laws that curtail speech. The constitution states what the government can, and can’t do. So that’s why the whole corporate personhood argument is completely irrelevant. That’s why I have such mixed feelings about the ruling. While the court might have been right on the free speech issue, because the FEC was literally trying to ban a film from the airwaves, because it was within the window close enough to the primaries. I wish there was another philosophical way to counter the ruling, but I just don’t see one.

 

And you're forgetting what this thread is about.

 

.

ALL of the cultural marxist USSC's evil antichrist, race-mixing, baby-killing, sodomite-mongering abomination decisions.

I hope my answer wasn't too vague.

.

 

And we are discussing one of those cases to overturn. You said corporations are not people therefore we should over turn Citizens United. The premise of your statement is wrong. The Supreme Court cannot change that law.

 

Yep let's bar the speech of Planned Parenthood and PETA and environmental groups who are all corporations. How about the Corporation for Public Broadcast let's silence them too!

 

They can nullify any law that is unconstitutional. Since corporations are not people it has no Right to Free Speech as that only applies to People.