The utterly moronic "Peoples Rights Amendment"

ProfessorBainbridge.com ^ | 4-20-2012 | Stephen Bainbridge

[SumProVita]

"...my friend and colleague Eugene Volokh makes much the same point in his usual erudite way:

So just as Congress could therefore ban the speech of nonmedia business corporations, it could ban publications by corporate-run newspapers and magazines — which I think includes nearly all such newspapers and magazines in the country (and for good reason, since organizing a major publications as a partnership or sole proprietorship would make it much harder for it to get investors and to operate). Nor does this proposal leave room for the possibility, in my view dubious, that the Free Press Clause would protect newspapers organized by corporations but not other corporations that want to use mass communications technology. Section 3 makes clear that the preservation of the “freedom of the press” applies only to “the people,” and section 2 expressly provides that corporations aren’t protected as “the people.”

Congress could also ban the speech and religious practice of most churches, which are generally organized as corporation. It could ban the speech of nonprofit organizations that are organized as corporations."

[TADSLOS]

No further need to distort the Commerce Clause or circumvent the enumeration of powers in Article I, Section 8. Call it the Freeway Amendment. No stop signs, no speed limit. Idiocracy, here we come.

[TLI]

Yep. I put it right at the top of the list.

Hammer - nail - POW!

.

[prisoner6]

Same my church. Decades ago they,started raising money to be sent to Idi Amin, S.E Asia and communist groups. When I asked the minister he defended it by saying while most of the money went to dictators, communists, and military, a little would make it’s way to the people who needed it.

I rarely attend that church now.

[oh8eleven]

I heard it clearly. The Methodist Church took part in the founding of Handgun Control Inc.
Yeah, and you also said the same church was soliciting money a week later, to build a hospital for the VC.
The VN War was over in January 1973 and Handgun Control wasn't founded until 1974.
The VC were extinct (by death and the '73 peace treaty), so how could anyone be building them a hospital?

[justiceseeker93]

Notice that labor unions aren't explicitly excluded from the definition of "person" in Section 2 of the proposed Amendment. So corporations can be deprived of rights that unions maintain. Only the Left would characterize this inequality as "fairness."

Incidentally, Chuckie Schumer recently called Citizens United the worst SCOTUS decision since Plessy v. Ferguson. Since Plessy was decided in the 1890s, that's really covering a lot of ground. Does Schumer really think, for instance, that the SCOTUS allowing corporate entities to make public comments about political candidates running for office is worse than the SCOTUS upholding President Roosevelt's power to send innocent Japanese Americans to detention camps during WWII (Korematsu case, 1944)? And would Schumer be forced to change that statement when and if the SCOTUS strikes down Obamacare?

[SWAMPSNIPER]

The time period I am talking about was the early 60s. I was in high school until 1960. The preacher was raising funds for gun control not very long after that, maybe not under the specific name HCI, but gun control just the same. The Methodist Church did play a role in anti gun activism along with the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. The NCC and WCC are leftist anti American to the core and have been for decades. No American church had or has any business being affiliated with either.
In 1973 I was 31 years old and had been fighting the gun control agenda for 16 years. I joined the NRA when I was 14.

[Eleutheria5]

Corporations and soilent greens is both peoples. All corporations are formed by people. Their stock is owned by people, or by other corporations whose stock is somewhere along the line owned by people. People serve as directors and officers. They employ people, and they provide goods and services to people. All an evil corporation is (most are not evil) is a reflection of the evil people hiding behind it. If their evil gets sufficiently egregious, they go to jail anyway, and the corporations gets liquidated. These are the facts of life. Corporations do not love or hate. They do not mate or date. They simply are. And the people who make it run have as much right to speak through the corporation as they do in person.

[monkeyshine]

Chuck Schumer is one of the worst as I’m sure you already know. As stated above all these people really want is control, they like power over others and they like that they can skirt the very same rules and regs that they want to impose on everyone else. Things like this absurdity are transparent. They somehow convinced the GOP to go along with campaign finance reform that exempted corporations but allowed unions to finance campaigns. And they still lost. It wasn’t until Obama swept them in that they regained control and they thoroughly abused that power, upset longstanding congressional precedent in order to cram down our throats the largest federal power grab since FDRs presidency. And they did it just after an election which was a referendum n that very idea and which saw them lose more seats than they had seen in a generation. So of course they are want to silence critics.

More than that though, it is against the very idea of a free country and a free people that the entities affected by laws and regulations should have no political voice to protest those very rules and regulations. Only a control freak would want a law that allows them to silence their critics, and the fact that the people keep sending men and women like Schumer back to represent them is sad and scary.