Justice Scalia to Speak at Wesleyan

[johnwesley]

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You keep referring to the Tillman Act and 100 years of precedent, except you are wrong. This is a red herring; Obama and you can keep saying it all you want, but that doesn’t make it true. Maybe the groupies and hard core will fall for it, but people who understand the law will not be fooled. All Citizen United did was overturn one provision of McCain Feingold, allowing PACs or corporations to use soft money for political speech referencing a specific candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. This has nothing to do with Tillman or any law that preceded McCain Feingold. So much for rolling back 100 years of law.</p>

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<p>P57 - You can’t have it both ways. You can’t quote dicta (those sidebars by which justices make sense of those endless case citatons), like you did back at post#49 and then pretend that <em>Citizens United</em> is just about one tiny provision of McCain-Feingold. </p>

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Scalia is correct.

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<p>Scalia is wrong. Corporations do not have the same First Amendment rights as living, breathing human beings. Corporations do not procreate, they do not get sick and die, they do not earn money by the sweat of their brow (in fact, they have no sweat glands.) Extending the same First Amendment rights to non-humans is absurd. What next? Robots? It’s easy enough to call a robot a corporation. Pets? People leave estates, complete with trustees, to their pets all the time. Or, how about just cutting to the chase, and declaring all dead people corporations? Elvis and Marilyn Monroe are still making money. Thanks to Justice Scalia they can run ads against Hillary Clinton – even though they died while before she even graduated college. </p>

<p>Maybe all those Chicago headstone counters were on to something.</p>