"Corporations Are Not People"

P.S. Huff

No creed is too absurd to win the assent of newspaper columnists. In today's Boston Globe, Jim McGovern and Jeff Clements haul out the tired line that "[c]orporations are not people." They say this in the course of denouncing Citizens United—a Supreme Court decision involving a constitutional guarantee that is not even limited to "people" by its text. Here are a few constitutional guarantees that are limited to people:

No person shall . . . be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; . . . nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Under the populist jurisprudence of McGovern and Clements, Congress would have a free hand to seize outright the property of any corporation in the land, without a trial and without a hearing.

McGovern and Clements might respond that this would affect the rights of actual people—namely, stakeholders in the corporation. That won't do. By the same reasoning, restrictions on corporate speech involve the free-speech rights of a corporation's owners and employees.

The sloganeers bemoaning corporate personhood seem not to have the slightest grasp of the implications of their argument. If corporations have no constitutional rights, what are we to say of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal? How will Regnery and Crown Forum fare in this brave new regime? Not well; and neither will the rest of us.