It isn't the 14th amendment that is the problem. It is the bizarre interpretation of the 1st amendment by the Supreme Court.
Complete article:
http://www.truth-out.org/problem-cit...ood/1326497162
"The incorrect - but widely held - reading of Citizens United is that the corruption of elections arose fundamentally because the Supreme Court adopted a legal doctrine of corporate "personhood" which endowed corporations with First Amendment free speech rights, which, combined with the notion that spending money to promote a candidate is a form of speech, gives corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of their money in elections. This incorrect reading of Citizens United is compounded by the further error that a constitutional amendment is necessary and sufficient to remove those corporate constitutional rights and to remove corporate money from elections, or could prevent the pro-corporate majority on the Supreme Court from making further decisions corrupting elections.
Fortunately, the inordinate influence of private money in elections can be fixed, and the fix is far easier to accomplish - and more certain of success if accomplished - than any kind of constitutional amendment, as described in "Constitutional Amendment Not Needed: Congress Already Has a Remedy."
The Supreme Court did not base its pro-corporate First Amendment decisions on supposed "constitutional rights" of corporations. Instead, it applied novel interpretations of the First Amendment that were independent of the identity of the speaker to open the floodgates of corporate money in elections, thereby turning elections into the high-return investment vehicles they are today.
The novel interpretations of the First Amendment were initiated in two Supreme Court cases decided decades before Citizens United. In its 1976 Buckley v Valeo decision, the Supreme Court equated spending money in politics with First Amendment protected speech and overturned federal limits on expenditures in elections as violating the First Amendment.
Thus, in Citizens United, the Supreme Court continued to articulate a theory of speech that underlies all the court's decisions allowing money into politics. What was novel in Citizens United was not anything remotely related to corporate personhood, but the court's expansion of the theory it provided in Bellotti from referendum questions to electioneering for candidates. In both cases, the court defined freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment from the perspective of the listener, rather than of the speaker. The court held that the listener had the right to listen to all sources, whether the sources be corporations, partnerships, other business entities, individuals, associations or nonprofits. The court relied on the phrasing of the First Amendment to rule that Congress could not abridge "freedom of speech" in the abstract, irrespective of the source of the speech or the rights - or absence of rights - of the speaker.
The court could not have made any clearer that the right it defined has nothing to do with the "personhood" of the speaker, the source of the money for the speech or the rights of the source of the money.
Many may be surprised to learn that no federal campaign finance law has ever been struck down by the Supreme Court on grounds of "corporate personhood" or any kind of corporate rights. The court has consistently hinged its decisions on the First Amendment rights of the listener to hear all sources of the free and open debate and of society to enjoy an abstract "freedom of speech" disconnected from the identity of the speaker.
Citizens United was not the only case in which the Roberts 5 placed their pro-1-percent thumbs on this scale of justice. Of the four other decisions since 2006 in which the Roberts 5 extended the role of private interest money in politics, three had nothing to do with corporations. While the fourth did as much as Citizens United to open wide the gates to corporate money, like Citizens United, it did so without resorting to corporate personhood or corporate "rights." Those four cases seem to have been largely ignored by those inflating the importance of "corporate personhood" as the key problem. Together these cases show that corporate personhood actually has nothing to do with the key problem of money in politics.
The relatively ignored 2011 Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett decision, which overturned an Arizona public campaign funding law adopted by referendum, is probably more important than Citizens United. This is because it struck down a way of using public funding to effectively compete with private interest money in elections. The Roberts 5 thus showed they would brook no workarounds of their decisions that have the effect of mandating corrupt elections.
Abolishing corporate constitutional rights or the legal concept of "corporate personhood," as it applies to elections, would have no effect on the court's analysis in Citizens United or any of these other four cases, because none of its decisions mentioned, relied upon or in any way depended on that concept or any rights of corporations. The same is true of all the court's decisions dating back to the 1976 origin of the "money is speech" doctrine. The decision in Citizens United struck down a 1907 federal law which prohibited corporate-sponsored political messages. That law had been adopted after two presidential elections in which massive, corporate-funded electioneering determined the outcomes led to popular outrage against corporate contributions and forced Congressional action.
No breathing human person with standing in the Citizens United case actually asserted the "right" to have his or her TV programming interrupted to hear a corporate-sponsored political message. This "right" of real living persons to hear corporate electioneering was created by the Roberts Court for an imaginary voter. The court allowed the not-for-profit corporate party in the case to rely on court-imagined rights of real, living human beings who were not parties to the case. So, the court in effect struck down laws embodying the long-standing will of the people without any plaintiff in court asserting an individual right violated by that law. Further, as Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor asserted in their dissent, the court used the case to "rewrite the law relating to campaign expenditures by for-profit corporations and unions" which also were not parties to the case. In all these ways, the court decision thus violated the Constitution's "case and controversy" requirement. The decision was actually no more than an "advisory opinion," a type of decision the US Supreme Court has no constitutional authority to make. The Roberts 5 thus played fast and loose with constitutional limitations on its powers.
Where the Roberts 5 did "shockingly" break new ground in Citizens United and did reverse clear precedent was in its failure to strike a rational and principled balance between the negligible speech value of private money in elections and the harm such private money causes to the democratic form of government. As stated by Justice James C. Nelson, dissenting from what he considered a futile effort by the Montana Supreme Court to insulate Montana from the pernicious and unconstitutional effects of the Citizens United decree:
Citizens United distorts the right to speech beyond recognition. Indeed, I am shocked that the Supreme Court did not balance the right to speech with the government's compelling interest in preserving the fundamental right to vote in elections. Western Tradition Partnership v. Attorney General Bullock (Montana, December 30, 2011)
The sterile, highly technical issue of corporate personhood is an antiquated doctrine that played no role in Citizens United or any of the other election cases. From a practical point of view, as the Supreme Court itself pointed out, whether corporations should have First Amendment rights is the wrong question to ask, and, also, the wrong argument to wage. Limiting the scope of who can enjoy speech rights alienates such potential allies as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and diverts energy away from the actual constitutional problems.
A public aroused by and sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street may pressure Congress for an immediately available solution already provided in the Constitution and based on ordinary majority votes, as described in the "Constitutional Amendment Not Needed: Congress Already Has a Remedy" article. Diverting this public into seeking an unnecessary constitutional amendment on an irrelevant issue allows the serious threat to democracy created by the present Supreme Court majority to continue for the 2012 election, and on into the indefinite future.
Consider, also, that attacking the actual First Amendment grounds used by the court demonstrates the gross unfairness of the court's decision. To see this, let's compare a recent, genuine First Amendment issue involving Occupy Wall Street protesters. In addition to their general assemblies, working groups, marches and demonstrations, in which they exercised their pure First Amendment rights of "freedom of speech" and "right of the people peaceably to assemble" the protesters used the extremely effective symbolic communication activity of encampments for discussion and learning by the dispossessed and the committed. The police violently attacked and destroyed encampments and arrested or assaulted many protesters who were clearly exercising rights embodied in the First Amendment.
While this pure political speech and assembly on behalf of the 99 percent has been violently suppressed, the use of money by the 1 percent to influence elections, politicians, policies and contracts for private gain continues under the protection of the Roberts 5. This amounts to one rule for the 1 percent and an entirely different rule for the protesters representing the 99 percent.
The comparison of the treatment of private money in elections with the treatment of Occupy encampments is instructive on both sides of the First Amendment scales. A fair balancing of the respective weights strongly favors protecting the Occupy protesters' First Amendment right to peaceably assemble in their highly communicative encampments that do no harm, while denying the 1 percent a right to corrupt politics with their high-return-on-investment transactional spending on behalf of candidates that are highly destructive to the democratic form of government. Unfortunately, so far, neither municipal authorities nor the Supreme Court has done that fair balancing.
The contrast in application of the rule of law is at the very heart of what Occupy Wall Street is protesting - one law for those in the 1 percent who paid for advertising to have representatives elected into government, and another law for the majority of the governed.
While corporate advertising often works to elect candidates favorable to the corporations, it does not appear to satisfy the democratic aspirations of the public: "the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 20 percent of likely US voters say the federal government has the consent of the governed."
The urgency of removing private money from elections demands first properly understanding the basis for the court's decisions. It also requires determination not to be diverted by politicians, fundraising public interest organizations or professional activists from using that understanding to create an effective strategy.
Fortunately, an effective strategy does not require a constitutional amendment, whether for the irrelevant task of repealing corporate personhood or for the imperative task of excluding private money - not just for-profit corporate money - from elections.
Without the corporate personhood and constitutional amendment diversions, Sen. Sanders, Rep. Deutch and an aroused public can demand that Congress use its existing constitutional powers under Article III, Section 2 to restore the traditional limits on court jurisdiction over the political question of private money in elections. Then Congress will be free to pass legislation abolishing corrupting private finance of elections. While substantial public pressure is still needed for Congress to pass this legislation with ordinary majority votes, the barrier to success is far lower than the third-thirds vote in each house and ratification by three-fourths of the states required for a constitutional amendment. This direct route to restoring government of, by and for the people addresses the actual constitutional problems raised by the court, removes court power to find other creative vehicles to corrupt election and is available now without a constitutional amendment."