Youngstown Daily Legal News

Cleveland area senator wants to abolish corporate personhood

TIFFANY L. PARKS
Special to the Legal News
Published: August 4, 2015

A Lakewood senator is calling on legislators at the state and federal level and other communities and jurisdictions to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would abolish corporate personhood and the doctrine of money as speech.

In Senate Resolution 187, Sen. Michael Skindell says government of, by and for the people has long been a cherished American value and that the people’s inalienable right of self-government is guaranteed in the federal Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

“Free and fair elections are essential to democracy and effective self-governance and persons are rightfully recognized as human beings whose essential needs include clean water and safe and secure food,” the resolution states.

“Corporations are entirely human-made legal entities created by express permission of we, the people, and our government.”

Skindell, a Democrat, writes that corporations can exist in perpetuity and simultaneously in many nations.

“(They) need only profit for survival and exist solely through the legal charter imposed by the government,” SR 187 states, adding that the “great wealth of large corporations allows them to wield coercive force of law to overpower human beings and communities.”

“Corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution, and we, the people, have never granted constitutional rights to corporations, nor have we decreed that corporations have authority that exceeds the authority (of citizens).”

Skindell has taken issue with Supreme Court justices deciding to treat corporations as “persons” in their interpretation of the Constitution.

The lawmaker wrote that the interpretation has long denied citizens the exercise of self-governance by endowing corporations with unintended constitutional protections.

Skindell wrote that the high court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), which rolled back the legal limits on spending in the electoral process, “creates an unequal playing field and allows unlimited spending by wealthy individuals, corporations and other entities to influence elections, candidate selection and policy decisions and to sway votes and compels elected officials to divert their attention from the people’s business or even to vote against the interest of their human constituents in order to ensure competitive campaign funds for their own reelection.”

“The judicial interpretation that construes spending money in political campaigns as speech is contrary to the notion of one person, one vote and allows those with the most money to have an unfair advantage in a political system that should ensure that all citizens have equal access to the political process and an equal ability to influence the outcome of elections,” SR 187 reads.

“Money is property, not speech.”

The resolution goes on to state that large corporations own most of America’s mass media and use that media as a “megaphone to express loudly their political agenda and to convince Americans that their primary role is that of consumers, rather than sovereign citizens with rights and responsibilities within our democracy.”

The proposal says that tens of thousands of people and municipalities across the nation are joining with the California-based Move to Amend campaign that calls for an amendment to the Constitution to abolish corporate personhood and the doctrine of money as speech.

SR 187 urges legislators at the state and federal levels to back the national, nonpartisan campaign.

According to its website, MovetoAmend.org, the coalition is requesting that Congress amend the Constitution to unequivocally state that inalienable rights belong to human beings only and that money is not a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment and can be regulated in political campaigns.

Skindell has encouraged the Senate to respond favorably to SR 187.

“The judicial bestowal of civil and political rights upon corporations can usurp basic human and constitutional rights guaranteed to human persons, and also empowers corporations to sue municipal and state governments for adopting laws that violate ‘corporate rights,’ even when those laws serve to protect and defend the rights of human persons and communities,” the resolution reads.

“Corporations are not and never have been human beings, and therefore are rightfully subservient to human beings and governments as our legal creations.”

SR 187 is co-sponsored by Sen. Edna Brown, D-Toledo. The measure is awaiting a committee assignment.

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