For the most part, the law has evolved to produce common sense results in the majority of cases. But two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court missed the common sense mark by about as much as it possibly could in ruling that corporations and other organizations can spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. Forget for a second the mental stretch involved in equating a greenback with free speech. This result is based on a second, even more absurd, thesis.
There is a standard legal fiction applied in a wide variety of situations: A corporation is the same as a person. We, for instance, wouldn’t want to give people free license to steal from a corporation, but say it’s not a crime because the theft didn’t harm a person. By the same token, we wouldn’t want to allow negligent acts that harm corporations to go uncompensated; otherwise, no one would bother to establish them.
Having said that, the blind application of a basic principle to a different concept is absurd. All of us know that a corporation really isn’t a person, and saying it is doesn’t make it so. And we don’t want to call a corporation of person if it’s going to interfere with free and fair elections.
I had what I thought was a very relevant comment prepared on the way populism is (still) portrayed by or media elites, but as it turns out everything I was going to say is best expressed in this very recent Matt Taibbi post.
Interesting. Although I typically read Matt Taibbi’s blog, which I receive via RSS feed, I had not yet read this post.
Law escapes me. Like George Will, I tend not to comment on that area as I am weak in it.
By the way: Who DAT! Who DAT! We are the world champions.