The topic of this essay is corporate engagement in campaign finance and whether companies should be considered individuals or not.
The author seeks to demonstrate how companies’ freedom of speech has been constrained for some time. The author discusses some of the difficulties concerning corporate involvement in federal election campaigns in the United States.
“From the moment the 14th Amendment was written in 1868, lawyers for businesses — particularly railroad companies — wanted to use that 14th Amendment promise of equal protection to ensure that governments didn’t treat corporations unequally,” says Monglen. Totenberg (2014). which shows how the definition of corporations in the constitution left courts in a dilemma of determining which rights should be accorded to corporations. “Nobody is saying that corporations are living, breathing entities, or that they have souls or anything like that.” (Totenberg, 2014,1). The author says “And we are now winding up using constitutional rules to concentrate corporate power in a way that’s dangerous to democracy.” (Totenberg, 2014,1).
When Shapiro states that nobody is purporting that corporations are living things, he means that the advocacy for corporations to be granted rights to be involved in federal elections and campaigns. According to Shapiro in the article, corporations are made up of people who have the right to get involved in campaigns. The author argues from the basis that corporations cannot exist without people in those corporations. People working in corporations should be granted the right to get involved in politics and campaigns because their right is protected under the fourteenth amendment of the constitution.
Works Cited
Totenberg, N. “When Did Companies Become People? Excavating The Legal Evolution”. NPR.Org, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution.
