Today, following a spirited Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which Senators on both sides of the aisle debated the Roberts’ Court recent decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the Constitutional Accountability Center (“CAC”) released a new comprehensive report on corporations and the text and history of the Constitution.  The report, entitled A Capitalist Joker: The Strange Origins, Disturbing Past, and Uncertain Future of Corporate Personhood in American Law, examines the text and history of the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s treatment of corporations from the founding-era through the Court’s recent decision in Citizens United.  The report, which is available here, demonstrates that the Court’s opinion in Citizens United is completely divorced from the text and history of the Constitution.  In upcoming months, CAC and ACS will jointly sponsor a series of events designed to bring attention to the decision’s radical departure from constitutional first principles.

As detailed in CAC President Doug Kendall’s testimony this morning, the Constitution’s text reflects a fundamental difference between corporations and “We the People” identified in the Constitution’s preamble.  Corporations do not vote, they cannot run for office, and they are not endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights.  “We the People” create corporations and we provide them with special privileges that carry with them restrictions that do not apply to living persons.

While the Supreme Court has long recognized that corporations may assert certain constitutional rights, corporations have never been accorded all the rights that individuals have, and have never been considered part of the political community or given rights of political participation.  The Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, and many times since, has emphasized that because corporations are artificial entities that receive special privileges such as perpetual life and limited liability, they are subject to greater regulation by the state.  Only once before, during the darkest days of the now-repudiated Lochner era, from 1897 to 1937, has the Supreme Court seriously entertained the idea that corporations are entitled to the same constitutional rights enjoyed by “We the People.”  And even in the Lochner era, equal rights for corporations never extended to the political process.

Citizens United is the culmination of a forty-year struggle by conservatives to reinvigorate the Lochner-era idea that corporations deserve equal constitutional rights.  In 1971, Lewis Powell – a Virginia corporate lawyer who would soon be nominated to the Supreme Court – advised corporations to look to the courts for relief, noting that that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” Powell’s strategy started to come to fruition just seven years later in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, when Powell authored a 5-4 ruling for the Court holding that limits on a corporation’s ability to oppose a ballot initiative violated the First Amendment.  The Citizens United ruling dramatically expands Powell’s ruling, holding that corporations have the same constitutional rights to spend money on elections as living breathing persons, giving corporations a constitutional right to participate in elections for elective office for the first time in American history.