Reply #7: You do recognize that their position was not arrived at from sympathy for corporations?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

The ACLU has a philosophy of the Constitution that is pretty close to internally consistent. That is not easy to do.

Historically I would guess that less than half of Supreme Court Justices have had an equally consistent view, from any idealogical perspective.

And a consistent view requires a lot of consistency... even of the inconvenient variety.

The ACLU is not supposed to be in the business of arguing backward from a specific desired result. They analyze issues in the context of a complex framework.

They made that argument knowing full well how it would play among their donors and made it anyway because they did not consider their position optional.

That should inspire trust more than anything.

(And the ACLU was hardly approaching it as a corporate rights issue except insofar as DU, for instance, is a corporation.)