Corporations as People? No. Money Is Speech? I Don't Think So!

I cannot understand some of the recent Supreme Court decisions.  Some of the justices seem to have read another constitution than the one I have studied and treasured throughout my academic life.  The interpretations about the political process beginning with the Citizens decision seem to negate my ideas about equal rights.  How can a corporation be a person?  When people are ill, they seek medical help; they don’t get government bailouts.  When people miss mortgage payments, they lose their houses.  When big banks lost money on mortgage gambling, tax payers came to their rescue.  They are too big to fail.  People are too small to be saved?

According to the first definition of person in Miriam Webster, a person is a human being.  A corporation is not a living human being and therefore, cannot be a person.  A corporation cannot vote, even after it has given all the money it wants to skew the political process.  Nonetheless, even though it cannot literally vote, it can buy votes.

How can money be speech?  First of all, money is not free, and not everyone has the same amount.  Does that mean that a full-time minimum wage earner making a little over $15,000 a year can talk as loudly, metaphorically speaking, as Bank of America’s CEO whose yearly compensation is $24.8 million?  When these figures are seen, even saying that money is speech is absurd.  Mitch McConnell is the Senator of Kentucky, and every time I’ve heard him equate money and speech, I am astounded as he should know the reality of poverty’s hardships well.  Kentucky is in the top five states in terms of poverty.  How can a representative of my home state say, “Money is speech,” as he is wont to do, when he should know what the out-of-work coal miner makes? 

And finally, how could SCOTUS so weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1968 by declaring that it is no longer as needed?  At this point, over 20 Red States have enacted new voting laws that make it difficult for inner-city residents to vote, even if they have voted numerous times in the past.  They have no need of a driver’s license, which is required for voting in many states, even though they may have numerous, verifiable photo ID’s. Some of the elderly either have never had a birth certificate either because they were born at home or have long ago misplaced the one that they had.  Not in the least surprising is that most of those for whom voting has been made more difficult lean toward the Democrats.  It is absolutely loathsome when Republican governors like Florida’s Gov. Scott shorten voting days and polling areas in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods, especially after evidence of long waiting lines and vote times in the last elections.  Florida’s ballot is often pages long, stuffed with amendments from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it takes the conscientious voter more than a moment to cast a vote. Additionally, his and other GOP governors’ moves to cut Sunday voting directly impacts the African-American community who have long made voting the Sunday before election day—Souls to the Polls--a tradition of long standing.  And Sunday voting also aids those who work six days a week and don’t get leisurely lunch breaks to do with as they please.  To deliberately make it difficult for certain voters and not others is discriminatory without a doubt.

When I watched John Lewis and others beaten and gassed as they peacefully walked across the Pettus Bridge in 1968, I wept.  And then, when they and many, many others completed that march all the way to Selma, I was so very hopeful that equal rights was going to become a reality.   And then followed the passage of the Voting Rights Act thereafter; it made me believe that the US had finally become what it could be, what it was meant to be.  I now feel very naïve because I really believed that was that; all could vote.  It never occurred to me that this could be undone!

What can you and I do about it?  Register to vote, no matter how inconvenient they make it for you.  Start early and find people to help you if you run into obstacles.  Lobby your elected officials to extend voting times and dates.  Shame them on social media if you must, but do make your views known.  Money is loud but so is persistence, especially if you organize others to make noise with you.  Do vote in all local and state elections.  The Democratic base turns out in presidential elections but is less faithful in off-year and local elections.  When we don’t vote, we cede our voice to others who don’t have our concerns for the environment, health care, the social safety net, women’s choice, etc.  Our failure to vote in 2010 state elections allowed Republicans to take more gubernatorial races than ever before in history.  That not only resulted in giving them power to gerrymander to their party’s advantage as well as to redo voting rights’ laws.

And so here is the take-away: SCOTUS rulings have made the rich and powerful more rich and powerful.  SCOTUS has made it more difficult for some to vote.   We, the people not rich and powerful in money but in voice, need to vote and vote and vote and to make our voices heard whenever and wherever.  Tweet, Facebook, e-mail, blog, write op-ed pieces.  Old school or new, do what it takes to reclaim your place in the political spectrum.