To the editor:
When the authors of the United States Constitution began that document with the words “We the People,” they had human beings in mind. No sane person in 1787 thought “We the People” included corporations.
Even today it’s hard to imagine any honest, rational person believing that corporations share the people’s rights to bear arms or worship freely or serve on juries or “to be secure in their persons” against unreasonable searches and seizures. Everyone knows a corporation isn’t a person in any reality any of us live in.
But corporations, made up of people with narrow interests often at odds with the Constitution, started making inroads on the Constitution during the 19th century, when the U.S. Supreme Court, riddled with conflicts of interest, decided that corporations could assume the legal fiction of personhood under certain circumstances.
More recently, against all common sense, the Supreme Court has decided that money is speech and that corporations with money are virtual people with the right to shout as loudly as they like, even if it drowns out the Constitution’s democratic electoral process. The most recent of these decisions, “Citizens United,” cleared the way for the radical effects of unlimited spending we’re seeing in elections across the country this year.
Given that the Supreme Court has the authority to say what the Constitution means, no matter how wrong-headedly the court defended slavery or racial bigotry or religious dogma, in time it reversed itself – or the people had the last word, by amending the constitution.
We are now, as a nation, faced with the need to amend the Constitution in order to restore its original and sensible meaning. Congress and the states have tried to control the influence of corporations and other non-persons in the electoral process, but the Supreme Court has gutted these laws, leaving the people, the nation, with the choice of amending the Constitution or accepting the inherently absurd notion that any non-human entity can be legally declared to be a person.
The process of amending the Constitution is long and difficult, and it will be possible only with the voice of the people calling for reform.
This year, in town meetings across Vermont, people will have their first formal opportunity to call for a Constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood and restore American elections to its people.
Please vote to move this process forward.
William Boardman,
Woodstock, Vermont
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