Reply #11: There is so much wrong with this [View All]

that I hardly know where to begin, and don't believe it's worth my time in any event.

Just a couple of the more egregious perversions of fact and logic in your post:

These judicial errors include primarily: 1) The assertion that money is a form of “speech

An oft-repeated, but fundamentally flawed statement of the principle involved. No one has ever claimed that money IS speech, or any form of it. What has been said, and what is undeniable, is that the right and ability to raise and spend money is inexorably linked to the ability to disseminate political messages. The fact that you and others like you are so worried about he possible consequences if the Citizens United decision (which had NOTHING to do with campaign contributions, btw) shows that you know this instinctively. Since you are so concerned that removing limits on such things will result in an increase in political speech (or, more accurately, an increase in political speech that YOU don't like), then you must also acknowledge that imposing such limits will inevitably reduce the dissemination of political messages, the very form of speech that the First Amendment was intended to protect more than any other.

A corporation is an abstract entity that is created by government, presumably to provide a public benefit. Given that it is created by the state, how can anyone seriously assert that it has “rights” in the sense that human beings have rights? Can anyone honestly believe that our Founders meant the protections of our First Amendment – or any other part of our Constitution – to apply to an abstract creation of the state?

Are you serious claiming that the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures doesn't and shouldn't apply to corporations? Are you asserting that the FBI should be free to seize the records of Acorn or Greenpeace or any of hundreds of other organizations that you can think of any time they want, with no legal recourse for those organizations? Or are you saying that the constitutional right to form contracts only applies to individuals and not corporations? Good luck buying a house, renting an apartment, buying or renting a car, or doing any of a thousand other things that you take for granted without that right.

The rest of this is just long-winded cut-and-pasting, in an attempt to give intellectual weight by number of words to fundamentally incorrect premises. Consequentialism is a really rotten way to approach constitutional issues. Nowhere is it written that the decision most in line with the Constitution has to be the one with the most favorable (to you) social consequences.