Corporate Personhood, and the Move to Amend logic.

Salon: In an instant-classic flub at the Iowa State Fair this week, Mitt Romney proclaimed, "corporations are people, my friend." But his statement unintentionally hit at another, under examined fact of American life: Corporations are people. That's at least in the opinion of the Supreme Court when it comes to certain legal issues. This is the doctrine known as "corporate personhood" that came into play in the Citizens United case in 2010.

To learn more about the issue, I spoke with David Cobb, an attorney and a spokesperson for Move to Amend, a coalition that advocates amending the Constitution to end the doctrine of corporate personhood.

Q: Mitt Romney said "corporations are people." Is he right?

Cobb: Well, he's correct in the sense that the U.S. Supreme Court has said that corporations are persons with inherent constitutional rights. Of course, he's wrong just as the court is wrong.

Legal personhood means that you can claim and assert constitutional rights. Remember that the Constitution does not create rights, it recognizes inherent, inalienable rights. In a nutshell, when a corporation can claim it is a person with constitutional rights, it means their lawyers can go into court and overturn democratically enacted laws.

The basic argument the court has made is that corporations are just composed of people who have individual human rights. Therefore when those people come together to create a corporation, the collection of people should be able to exercise those same constitutional rights. That's not logical, because these groups of people are not speaking with one mind. And they have not created an inherent human being whenever they come together collectively.

The McCain-Feingold law; the court said the law was treating wealthy people and corporations as an "oppressed minority" and therefore overturned a democratically enacted law … Another one is Louis K. Liggett Co. v. Lee from 1933, where the court overturned a law attempting to favor local merchants over chain stores. The law provided for a different tax structure for local, independently owned businesses versus corporate franchise businesses. The court overturned that, arguing that the law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Q: Your organization wants a constitutional amendment on corporations. What would it do exactly?

Cobb: It would entrench that money is not speech, and that only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights. It would allow local, state and federal government to pass any number of laws. It's saying that we would be able to engage in a proper political debate about the role of not only corporations but also how our society operates. For example, we could theoretically prohibit all political activity by corporations, including lobbying and donations. These activities are currently legal because corporate personhood protects them under the First Amendment.

We could return to environmental and health regulations that once allowed regulators to have surprise inspections on corporate polluters; but that was overturned because the court claimed it violated the prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.