An opportunity to debate corporations’ rights — VOICES for REASON

In choosing a successor to retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, President Obama is preoccupied with the Court’s recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That’s the case upholding a corporation’s right to spend its own money speaking out during political campaigns.

Obama has made no secret of his disdain for that decision. Justice Stevens authored the dissent in that case—the dissent that Obama wishes had been the majority decision. Stevens argued at length for sustaining the power of campaign finance regulators to throttle corporate speech.

Speaking in the Rose Garden recently, Obama said he’s searching for “someone who, like Justice Stevens, knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.” In short, Obama wants Citizens United to be overturned, and he’s looking for a new Justice who will be as steadfast as Stevens was in opposing corporations’ rights.

The upcoming confirmation hearings will furnish a good opportunity to debate both sides of this issue, if only the Judiciary Committee’s senators are up to the task. They will need to read carefully Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United. And they will need to focus on the key passage (at page 33 of the slip opinion) in which he wrote that corporations have First Amendment rights because citizens have those rights, and corporations are simply “associations of citizens” that have “taken on the corporate form.”

Let the debate begin: Was Justice Kennedy right or wrong? Are corporations privileged creatures of the state lacking rights such as freedom of speech, or are they contractual associations of individuals that have genuine rights delegated by those individuals? That’s a discussion worthy of a great nation’s legislature, and it’s a necessary discussion if American businesses are to be defended against the continuing attacks on their freedom.

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