To the editor:

I’m flabbergasted that The Collegian’s editors issued a “thumbs up” for the 5-4 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, which ruled laws designed to curb corporate influence in politics violate First Amendment free speech. How is increasing corporate influence via campaign contributions good for democracy? President Obama argued the ruling “will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”

Conservatives have also been skeptical of corporate influence on American politics. Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented in a 1979 decision voiding Massachusetts’s restriction of corporate political spending. Since corporations receive special legal and tax benefits, said Rehnquist, “it might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere.”

Public Campaign advocates for the Fair Elections Now Act, a bipartisan bill that would allow candidates to campaign using small donations (capped at $100 per person) and limit public financing. California voters can support a statewide measure on the June 8, 2010 ballot since Gov. Schwarzenegger signed the Fair Elections bill.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested the Court’s majority might have it all wrong and should reconsider the 19th century precedent: The Court, in 1886, “gave birth to corporations as persons. There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.” Justice Ruth Ginsburg evoked the Declaration of Independence: “A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights.”

Matthew A. Jendian, Ph.D.
Associate Professor & Chair of Sociology
Director, American Humanics Nonprofit Administration Program