If Alito is a "strict" reader of the Constitution, and not an "activist"

[BR_Parkway]

judge - can we count on him to repeal all the rulings that granted Corporations their 'personhood'? It wasn't in the Constitution, it was implied in several cases argued before the SCOTUS, most notably the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394).

The RePugs are always chattering about doing away with these type of rulings, that the Constitution is not a 'living document' and that it needs to be read according to the way the Founding Fathers wrote it. Perhaps some cases affecting the 'citizenship' of our non-taxpaying, lobby hiring, campaign donating, law writing corporations need to come before these strict interpreters.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. oh, you know they have a selective memory

and they'll forget that they said that about the Constitution. Instead, they'll say that certain things have radically changed, like the fact that African-Americans are counted as more than three fifths of a person.....

[Occulus]

2. Actually, that wasn't simple 'judicial activism"

It amounted to, in essence, a declaration of a king; the court actually refused to hear arguments that pertained to the personhood of the corporation in that case. Moreover, the decision to treat corporations as persons for the purposes of that case appears in the headnotes, not the body of the decision.

Headnotes have no force of law in the first place, as I understand things. Perhaps I'm wrong and someone else will clarify.

I think I also read somewhere that the court revisited the issue in the 1970s, but was unwilling to repeal the personhood of the corporation due to perceived economic impact.

The fact that corporations do not deserve rights under our Constitution escaped both courts.

[Loge23]

3. On activism

Many of you folks probably heard Air America yesterday when at least three anchors mentioned the record of activism on the bench.
Thomas, Kennedy, and Scalia have the highest percentages of overturning congressional laws.
The so-called liberal wing: Souter, Ginsburg, O'Conner have the lowest percentage.
I asked a righty this AM if they were for or opposed to activist judges. He said opposed. I not sure they know what they are talking about!

[expatriot]

4. the difference between the two is that conservatives do not consider

any of the Amendments, except the Second Amendment, to be part of the Constitution, especially anything to do with "equal protections."

[Coastie for Truth]

5. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394).

The insidious discrimination in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (118 U.S. 394) is the corporartions - which are "virtual beings" created by a Legislature are "persons" - and they have no DNA, no respiration, no metabolization, no ATP/ADP.

But our little, furry, quadupedal people are not granted like status--->

<>

Coastie's Kittie

THIS DEMANDS A KITTY CAT PICTURE SUB-THREAD

[eallen]

6. The wingnut rhetoric is both hypocritical and false to the facts...

Hypocritical, as you point out, because they are happy with strained interpretations that fit their beliefs. False to the facts because the current Constitution is not as the founders wrote it. As the founders wrote it, the Constitution allowed states to define an entire class of people as chattel property. After the Civil War, this was corrected by the reconstruction amendments. These precisely are the parts of the Constitution that the extreme right wish didn't exist. Lino Graglia has written on his desire to repeal the 14th amendment.

But the rightwing's wish that these amendments didn't exist doesn't make them disappear. Until Graglia and his cohorts manage to repeal these amendments, the Constitution has changed quite a bit, regarding the relationship between state and individual, by these amendments.

[Lexingtonian]

7. corporate personhood is not the problem

because that merely gives the entity unity in the eyes of the law, i.e. taxation and litigaion. It's that the duties of citizenship are not properly imposed on this entity despite conceding it all the rights (and lots of privileges), that is the problem.

The whole way citizenship has suffered stunted development/evolution since ~1860 -the point being to deprive many and privilege some- is the historical problem of our political era. That's what unifies our fights about corporate rights, taxation, minority rights, womens' rights, gay rights, voting rights, and religious rights (aka church/state separation).

The American corporation is the surviving vehicle/fortress institution of settlement colonialism. All the defeated elements of colonialism have crept behind corporate legal walls: you can run an American corporation as, or for the ends of, a theocracy, as a monarchy/feudal system, as a slaveholding plantation, as male privilege zone, as a pirate ship.