The USSC does not say that "money is speech" [View all]

[cthulu2016]

The courts also do not say "corporations are people."

And debunking things courts do not say is like creationists debunking the statement, "your grandfather was a monkey."


Since these issues are complex it would be better to seek to understand them so as to better contend against, and potentially reverse, the malign effect of some recent court decisions.

DU is, in fact, a corporation. And your donations to DU are, in fact, protected political expression.

So it should be stipulated that people can join together to avail themselves of the same benefits and protections that business enjoys in collective action... there is no good reason why Dow Chemicals can incorporate and the Sierra Club cannot.

And it should be stipulated that funding speech and distributing speech are intimately connected to speech.

There are things one can do with money that are part of their speech rights. Not the money itself, the use of money. (Is protection of your right to put something in the collection plate every Sunday a statement that "money is religion"? No. But money can be part of the free exercise of religion. The question is when and how.)

It would make no sense to say that Michael Moore is free to make Fahrenheit 911, but that he cannot sell it to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment to make and sell DVDs of it.

And it would make no sense to say that Congress can outlaw sales of that DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment because Sony didn't author the film, and has no 1st Amendment rights, being a corporation.


And as to corporations being people... thankfully Mitt Romney is not a federal judge. Nobody has found, legally, that a corporation is a person. Corporations are held to have the legal status of persons for certain purposes. If they were not they could not enter into a contract. They could not sue or be sued.

And as with DU, Sony DVD and the Sierra club, a corporation formed to disseminate speech does have some speech rights.

The questions are about the dimension and character of those rights, not whether they exist.

How can or cannot these rights that everyone knows exist be limited?

And the same goes for money. Of course some uses of money enjoy 1st Amendment protection. The questions are the dimension and character of that protection.