Corporations are not “persons”, they are legal entities. That is a fact that anybody with a normal IQ can easily see and understand. Money is not speech. Again, no normal person thinks otherwise.
Unfortunately, activist extremist judges like Samuel Alito and John Roberts, as well as several judges before them have bastardized the legal definitions of these simple concepts almost beyond recognition.
When we grant to corporations human rights, we are in effect providing unequal (more) rights to the owners of the corporation than we grant to non-owners. Each individual person already has his or her own constitutional rights. But if a corporation has "rights" too then the owners of the corporation have their own rights, and also their share of the corporate rights. This is unequal treatment under the law. This is better treatment for rich people than for everyone else.
As to money and speech, I will start by quoting former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens:
“While money is used to finance speech, money is not speech. Speech is only one of the activities that are financed by campaign contributions and expenditures. Those financial activities should not receive the same constitutional protection as speech itself. After all, campaign funds were used to finance the Watergate burglaries — actions that clearly were not protected by the First Amendment.” - Justice Stevens before the Senate Rules Committee, April 30, 2014
So while speech is speech, and money might be used to promote speech, money is also a whole host of other things too. The United States Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech, not all the activities one can engage in using money.
Please support a Constitutional Amendment to define corporations as legal entities with no innate rights, and distinguish between speech and money. My favorite is MoveToAmend.org
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