Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens

That's a self-refuting statement. You're "ok" with "free speech" as long as you control it.

Yep, you're right; sorry. Go ahead and delete it from where you quoted me and it will disappear.

Fixed it.

No, that's NOT what I said at all. I want everyone to have equal access to the legislative process. Pitting individuals against a corporation in a spending war, exactly whom do you think is going to win EVERY damn time?

No prob, we all get emotional about things that are near and dear to our hearts; such as politics. I like gentlemanly debate and it's nice to see you do too.

The slide to corporations having the same protected Constitutional rights as individuals began long before Citizens United and long before the off-hand, sidebar comment in Santa Fe Rail Road became the SCOTUS precedent for corporations as individuals.

Do a bit of history on the law of persona ficta as it pertains to admiralty law and then to commerce, and the lines are very clear as to how and why we got to where we are with corporations.

GG, you may not like it, but the legal history for it is very long and very plain. It's good law, and it's Constitutional. When you further figure that corporations and corporate law govern all non-profits, unions, associations, etc., that are represented as fictional persons and their own entities in contracts, disputes, cases, property ownership, etc., the line can't be drawn to divide one from another in regards to speech and pass Constitutional muster. At least, no more so than any line could be drawn between men of different skin tones or religious beliefs, and that clearly is unconstitutional.

As for Stevens veracity and any treatise on that, it'd be quite short: he has none, therefore there is none.

That's not your call to make. There�s no way to get around it; you�re proposing controlled access to speech. Why shouldn�t the 10,000 people that make up a given corporation be able to yell with their combined 10,000 voices? That�s exactly what the NRA does for us. And just because the NRA�s interest is in firearms access and a corporation�s interest is in protecting its investment doesn�t change that, nor would it matter if it did.

Exactly. Ditto the ACLU, Gun Owners of America, the Sierra Club, AFL-CIO, etc.

All of that is nice in a world of absolutes. But we've created a system that is extremely lopsided. Think about it...when was the last time a major law was passed on the national level without corporate support?

"A government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation"...yeah, that sounds better than people.

Again, I'm the farthest thing from anti-corporation; I own a corporation. But corporations own the process; that's broken.

Show me where to draw the line in the Constitution and through the legal precedent of centuries.

You're speaking out boths sides of your mouth; a corporation is nothing but people. Do you similarly propose to limit the NRA's access to speech?

Well it's really not defined in the constitution, the corporation part. That's why we need to make a constitutional amendment TO define it. Going back to the turn of the 20th century, we had defined such limitations through law, but like I said; that has all been eroded through constitutional issues.

Will it make things much more complex? Yes it will, but regardless of the absolutes, the system is broken.

I don't know, maybe you like the fact that THE PEOPLE don't have a seat at the table for the political process.

We did not have that in the early 20th. Santa Clara Rail Road was the late 19th Century. The vast majority of the law around persona ficta predates that by centuries, and quite a bit took place in the US during the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries.

The PEOPLE have the same seats at the table they always have had, or the same lack thereof.

Just out of curiosity: which corporations get eliminated and how?

Look up the Tillman Act of 1907.

That Act would be just as unconstitutional today as it was then. There was also no enforcement mechanism within that Act; it was a paper tiger, at best.

Again, which corporations would be prohibited and which would not be? What prohibitions would apply, to which, and why?

Yes it would, that's why it would require a constitutional amendment to clearly define what a corporation is and is not.

As to which corporations, I'd have to seriously look into that; the devil is in the details. That's why I said in my first post that I would support such a concept but I wanna see the legislation. But it's not my job to know all of the nitty-gritty details; I'm not the law maker.

Restricting freedom of speech is not something I take lightly. The only reason I consider such a thing is because of the situation we have today now that all bets are off (Citizens United and McCutcheon). Here we have a clear cut case where we need to put limits in place because we have completely lost control of the legislative process.

This is EXACTLY the opposite of a situation conservatives would never live with. Where corporations have NO say, and people can just vote in anything they want and take everything away from corporations. That would be a horrible situation. But now we have a situation where the corporations have the ability to form and make law any way they want, taking everything away from the people.

If you believe the former is bad, you HAVE to believe the latter is just as bad.

"Daniel-san; you need balance" - Mr. Miaggi

BTW 4ager; you're very fun to debate...you're SMART!!

You shouldn�t be taking it at all. It was for protection against precisely this type of attack that the First Amendment was written. You�re on the wrong side of this issue.

I agree with Justice Stevens. I think the entire constitution should be changed about every lifetime or generation. I don't see why today's generation should have to live under a pact that took place hundreds of years ago by people who for the most part weren't even voted into office, and when the country was much different than it is today. Each generation should make its own supreme law of the land.

You, are a fool.