March 29, 2006

By DEAN RITZ
Contributing Writer

April 1: In a landmark 8-0 decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court revoked Constitutional rights protections for human persons. In the case, The Largest Corporations in America v. Citizens of the United States, lawyers for the corporate plaintiffs argued the United States government violated the corporations’ Constitutional rights by extending similar rights to human persons. The court said such rights belong to corporate persons exclusively.

Critics immediately denounced the decision as undemocratic. “It means that only those persons who control corporations will have any rights at all,” said Chuck Beard, executive director of Save Human Rights. He added, “It takes an undemocratic institution like the Supreme Court to make such a sweepingly undemocratic decision.”

Conservative political and business organizations were quick to defend the decision. Constitutional research fellow Thomas Linseed, from Corporations for the American Way, expressed his support. “Finally, we return to our great nation’s roots, where corporations have the full power of the government at their disposal,” he said.

Linseed continued, “It’s not solely about rights just for corporations. More importantly, it is about corporate directors being able to do what they want without interference from the government. Rights for corporations simply means that corporate directors have the Constitution on their side when people get uppity and challenge corporate decisions.”

The Court also broke with tradition by deciding in favor of plaintiffs’ highly unusual request for damages. The Supreme Court has never before awarded damages in the exclusively Constitutional cases before it. When asked about the unusual request for damages, plaintiffs’ lead attorney, Charlotte Tun, responded, “Why do you think our founding fathers called it the “Bill of Rights”? We just turned over that bill to the best collection agency American corporations have ever had: the Supreme Court.”

The decision is sure to be controversial at it appears to completely overturn more than 200 years of legal precedent. For most of our nation’s history, some human persons had the government securing and enforcing Constitutional rights. Gradually, and with great effort, rights protections were extended to other persons: women, African Americans, and corporate persons (though corporate persons received them first). However, plaintiffs successfully argued that the word “People” found in the Constitution’s Preamble, “We the People,” has been misinterpreted as referring to human persons rather than corporate persons.

Prosecuting attorney Charlette Tun expanded upon her clients’ claims, noting that the Constitution’s primary author, Alexander Hamilton, founded the First Bank of the United States. “We argued that since this country’s inception it has been run by a corporate class,” she said. “The Constitution was written by members of this class.

“ Normally, corporate directors can do whatever they want. Through their well-paid representatives they write and enact legislation and set regulations. They can build and dump what they want where they want and it’s all perfectly legal, mostly.”

But not everyone accepts corporate claims to rights. Recently, and most notably in the federal court case Frost et al., v. St. Thomas Development, Inc., some human persons have asserted Constitutional rights claims against the government. Frost plaintiffs claim that the government’s grant of constitutional rights to corporations renders citizens politically powerless against the corporate directors. According to briefs in this case, it effectively grants to the directors more rights than it grants to other persons, and that is a violation of the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal rights as well as a violation of their right to a republican form of government, as secured in Article IV Section IV of the Constitution.

Tun acknowledged that the Frost case had some bearing on the decision to pursue this case. “My clients have tolerated these claims by human persons for over two centuries, but now it’s necessary to put them to rest.”

The request for damages was based on Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Code, which permits financial compensation from the persons who violate the rights of a member of a protected “class.” Prior to 1996, human persons of African American descent were the sole members of this protected class. With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, corporations received civil rights protections. Now, following this decision, these protections will no longer apply to any human persons Instead, they will apply exclusively to corporations. This part of the Civil Rights Code originally was passed following the Civil War to protect the Constitutional rights of newly freed slaves.

In some sense, this case re-establishes and expands upon the Dred Scott decision of 1857, one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in U.S. history. Dred Scott, an African American slave, had brought suit seeking freedom for him and his wife, then also a slave. In that case, the Court decided that because slaves are property not people, he had no standing for the protection of law. In other words, slaves were invisible to the law, and the Court had been mistaken to have heard Scott’s claim at all. Now, with the decision in The Largest Corporations of America, all human persons are left without Constitutional protections — something the Court calls “equal non-rights.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. notes this history. “Non-rights have a long and contentious history in our country. African Americans, women, Native Americans, and white men without property have all suffered from inequality before the law. Now, all human persons possess equal non-rights before the law: equality achieved absolutely.”

Justice Souter did not vote on this case, recusing himself due to a potential conflict of interest as he is a corporation, not a human person. n