In her very first appearance as a Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor struck right to the very heart of the matter:
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Going back to the question of stare decisis, the one thing that is very interesting about this area of law for the last 100 years is the active involvement of both State and Federal legislatures in trying to find that balance between the interest of protecting in their views how the electoral process should proceed and the interests of the First Amendment.
And so my question to you is, once we say they can’t, except on the basis of a compelling government interest narrowly tailored, are we cutting off or would we be cutting off that future democratic process? Because what you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court’s error to start with, not Austin or McConnell, but the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.
But we can go back to the very basics that way, but wouldn’t we be doing some more harm than good by a broad ruling in a case that doesn’t involve more business corporations and actually doesn’t even involve the traditional nonprofit organization? It involves an advocacy corporation that has a very particular interest.
Although she tailored her remarks to the case at hand, very narrowly, just the idea of questioning from the bench the notion of the correctness of corporate personhood is like a clarion call in the chaos. Corporate personhood is why we have the mess in Washington, D.C. that we do. We need corporations to be for the public benefit again, and not immortal, and unable to lobby or donate to political campaigns.
Thank you, Justice Sotomayor!
