When the Supreme court decided that corporations are people, that sounded the death knell for our democracy. Millions are pouring into republican war chests.

The principle that a corporation is a "person" was established primarily by the "Marshall Court" (1801 - 1835) when Chief Justice John Marshall and "his court" faced the problem of creating concepts of what a corporation should be, in the face of an increase in schemes for making money, many of which were destructive, unfair to competing interests, and counter to principles (and to some extent ideals) inherent in the founding structure of the country.

The thing decided by the recent SCOTUS was not that the corporation is a person, since that was already an established concept. What the new decision was is that a "corporate person" is different in a specific way from an "actual person," and also different than some "other kinds of persons that are not real persons" in that a "corporate person" may make UNLIMITED donations to a "person" running for political office, while "other kinds of persons, including real persons" are restricted in the amounts they may donate.

It MIGHT BE appropriate, based on prior principles, to allow corporate donations; but the Court evaded (or was too stupid to see the full impact) the need to more fully define limits on the "personhood" of corporations as political donors in a way consistent with the limits on others.

It is an established principle in law, and particularly for the Supreme Court, that a court should answer only the questions asked by petitioners, and if the question isn't asked there is a principle involved when the court limits their own extension of the question, to establish new rules that are not clearly and directly related to the suit. To do more would be the "activism" so widely claimed (often falsely, esp by Replublican lackeys) by those who just don't like any limits on their ability to abuse the law.

The decision on Corporate Donations is WRONG, only partly because the Court made a poor decision, but mainly because petitioners didn't ask the complete and appropriate questions. (And nobody filed a counter-petition to raise questions about the obvious consequences.)

John