Comment & Debate
Jim Sleeper. “Corporate free speech? Since when?” Boston Globe. September 5, 2009 “She’s right, because a publicly traded business corporation, driven to maximize profits by market competition and its own charter, can’t rise above that mission any more than it can dance nude. Corporations aren’t “voluntary associations’’ with republican intentions, as Justice Antonin Scalia claims; in a civic sense, they’re mindless, because their shareholders change with every stock-price fluctuation.
Even a “nonprofit’’ corporation like Citizens United doesn’t deliberate openly with Americans as fellow citizens; it exists only to advance a business agenda in politics and is closed to persuasion.”
The constitutional law scholar Laurence H. Tribe: “Talking about a business corporation as merely another way that individuals might choose to organize their association with one another to pursue their common expressive aims is worse than unrealistic; it obscures the very real injustice and distortion entailed in the phenomenon of some people using other people’s money to support candidates they have made no decision to support, or to oppose candidates they have made no decision to oppose.”[1]