Posted on 07/02/2014 12:16:41 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Yes....
Are unions?
More of this nonsense! Neither Citizens United nor Sibelius v. Hobby Lobby turned on the notion of corporations as juridical persons. They are both based on the principle that the owners of a corporation do not give up their political and religious rights simply by dint of having gone into business and filed incorporation papers.
It is the owners’ rights that are vindicated by both decisions, not the rights of the corporation as a juridical person.
Now let’s have a suit by a publicly-traded corporation which happens to have a majority of its equity owned by adherents of religions that object to abortion (or contraception in-toto) to extend the same right of religious freedom to its owners. (Of course at the next shareholder meeting they could vote to cover either if a majority share no longer objects.)
A corporation is a legal construct, to limit the liability that may be directed at any one participating person in a suit for monetary damages. But corporations, at their essence, are directed by real human beings, and the decisions are by living persons. So any test of the “personhood” of a corporation has to recognize that the mere document creating the legal construct cannot, does not, exercise any degree of will, but people do.
Exercise of will = person.
If I freely associate my self with a group of people that interacts with the government and provides members to be part of the government, does that group (AKA, a politicla party) have free speech rights?
So... A Company is a Company and not a person, its owner is irrelevant.
Unless the Owner is a Black, or Women, or Minority, then the Government recognizes the Owner first and they get special treatment under the “law” for that company.
But if the owner is a Christian, then the Company is again a Company, and not a person. Got it.
Under certain circumstances, yes. And have been since a Supreme Court decision around 1820.
HHS has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage. The employees of these religious non-profit corporations still have access to insurance coverage without cost sharing for all FDA-approved contraceptives; and according to HHS, this system imposes no net economic burden on the insurance companies that are required to provide or secure the coverage.
Although HHS has made this system available to religious nonprofits that have religious objections to the contraceptive mandate, HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available when the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections.
So Hobby Lobby's employees will be able to get the same abortifacients via the same insurer, but without Hobby Lobby paying for it. On the other hand, the insurer isn't paying for it, because this arrangement "imposes no net economic burden" on the insurer.
So the morning-after gal isn't paying for the night before, her religious employer isn't paying for it, and their insurance company isn't paying for it. Yet somehow that nine bucks a month gets paid. How? Appellate lawyer Mark Arnold:
In other words, they just add one loop or two to the procedure but the end result seems to be the same...A meaningless decision. The less restrictive alternative that the majority settled on is a certification by Hobby Lobby that it opposes contraceptive coverage, after which the insurance company must provide that coverage for free. Meaning that the premium charged to Hobby Lobby will necessarily include the cost of the free contraception. All smoke and mirrors.
He completely missed the origins of corporate civil rights, during the administration of Lincoln. He wanted the growth of American industrialism to go ahead at full steam, in particular the railroads, moving West. This happened during the Civil War, in that there was no more opposition in congress by the South.
This brought major growth in truly national corporations, not just limited to single states. Often, as with railroads, corporations just wanted to pass through some states en route to other states. But the state legislatures of the pass through states saw these corporations as “cash cows”. In effect, forcing them to do business in that state that they didn’t want to do, for the right to pass through.
So after a lawsuit made it to the SCOTUS, and the justices reached their decision, the court reporter of the SCOTUS asked the chief justice if their decision implied that corporation had civil rights. The chief justice said that was what the other justices thought, so the court reported noted it down.
And from there: not an act of congress, nor a written decision of the Supreme Court, nor an act by the president, was the origins of corporate civil rights.
Since then, business law is dominated by corporate civil rights law.
Technically speaking, this creates a constitutional dilemma, because human civil rights are exclusively endowed “by the Creator”; but corporate human rights are exclusively granted by government. So confusing the two is begging for disaster.
There actually needs to be a constitutional amendment to make this point clear: that corporations *do* have rights granted by government; but that these rights are *not* natural rights or human civil rights.
I think it’s one of the very first laws of the USA that a corporation is a “person” for purposes of the law.
Levin said something about it the other night.
During the last election campaign, when Mitt Romney pointed out that Corporations were in fact people, he was roundly excoriated and laughed at by the Libs and the press, unreal...
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If, as the left loves to claim, corporations are not people why do they want them taxed? Do computers or filed papers pay taxes?
Regarding if corporations can be regarded as people under the Constitution, please consider the following. I read a little about the history of patents, the Founding States having delegated to Congress the power to award inventors and authors the power to protect their ideas as evidenced by Clause 8 of Section 8 of Article I.
Patent
To me, given that the Founders decided to reward inventors and authors with temporary monopoly power to encourage people to share their ideas, I have no problem with the idea that corporations can be regarded as people under the Constitution.
This isn’t about corporations. Hobby Lobby was about a “closely held” translation family company that practices its religion in their stores.
We should all be flocking to them today.
The main reason that some politicians are concerned about corporations, imo, is because crook politicians want to hold on to their piece of the constitutionally non-delegated federal power that the feds are wrongly exercising these days, such power actually 10th Amendment protected state power which the feds have wrongly stolen from the states.
As mentioned in other threads, if patriots and their state lawmakers would put a stop to the tsunami of constitutionally indefensible federal taxes that are now going to DC, then crook politicians would probably complain less about corporations who bribe federal lawmakers for earmark spending favors, many earmarks not justifiable under Congress's Constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
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