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Following the US Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which unleashed unlimited and largely unaccountable corporate spending in American elections, Move to Amend formed to engage the American people to stand up and say no to corporate domination of our democracy. Democracy is threatened not only by this decision but also by other court decisions which have bestowed human rights onto corporations, making them corporate persons. The nation’s founders did not intend corporations to have these rights, leaving the individual states to both regulate corporations and bestow upon them legal rights subject to law.
Those corporate persons have used these court-given corporate personhood rights to undermine the democratic aspirations of the American people, to undermine our legislatures and other regulatory and law-making bodies. Finding laws and regulations not to their liking, these national and multinational corporate beings have spent money on political bribes (political contributions) in our city halls, in our state legislatures and in our Congress to have those laws and regulations changed or eliminated. And if they fail in those venues, they then claim in our court system that those laws and regulations somehow challenge their personhood rights and must be overturned.
We agree with Justice Stevens in his dissent in the Citizens United decision when he wrote, ". . . . corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We, the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."
Further, we agree that the US Constitution must be amended to establish that the Bill of Rights applies only to human beings,not corporate beings; that Money is Not Speech and that Congress and our state legislatures must be able to regulate the spending of money and the amounts of contributions and expenditures used in political campaigns, and that such limits, including bans on corporate spending, are constitutional.