Dear Editor,

This letter is in response to a letter which appeared in your January 28th edition, from an officer of a group called the Green County United to Amend. That organization is proposing that the United States Constitution be amended solely for the purpose of nullifying the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that was decided in 2010. I wish to address certain problems with that proposal.

It should be noted that Constitutional amendments are a very rare thing. Since its adoption in 1787, the Constitution has only been amended 27 times. Two of those do not count since one, the 21st, repealed the 18th (the prohibition amendment). The first ten amendments were adopted all at the same time in 1791 and are known as the Bill of Rights. Thus there have, in effect, been only 15 amendments in 229 years, and none of those were adopted solely in response to one decision of the Supreme Court.

The ruling in the Citizens United case is contained in the Opinion of the Court, which is 57 pages long. In referring to an Opinion of the Court, it is always important to refer to the actual wording of the opinion itself, not to how someone else paraphrases it. Only the Opinion of the Court has the force of law. Dissenting opinions do not have that status.

In her letter, the officer of Green County United to Amend states that the court in Citizens United held that “corporations are people” and “that the money they donate…is free speech.” That is incorrect. At no place in the Opinion of the Court in Citizens United does the Court make either of those statements. Critics of the decision have characterized the Opinion as making those statements, but they are incorrect. The writer of the letter referred to the holding of the Court in Citizens United as being “balderdash.” I believe that her mischaracterizations regarding what the Court actually said are what amount to “balderdash.”

What the Court did hold is that organizations such as corporations and unions enjoy certain Constitutional protections. One of those is the right to engage in political speech and to expend money for that purpose. That is not the same as saying that corporations are people or that money is speech.

The proposed Constitutional amendment is publicly available. One version (introduced as House Joint Resolution 48) and which is the version that groups such as Green County United to Amend are trying to put on the referendum ballot would amend the Constitution to provide, among other things, that “artificial entities…shall have no rights under this Constitution.” I have to doubt that proponents of the amendment understand the scope and implications of that language. There are many Constitutional rights which have always protected corporations and unions, as well as individuals. Just a few of those are the right to trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures and protections against taking of property without just compensation.

Some of those who support the proposed amendment may be of the belief that anything that hurts corporate America is good. People such as Senator Bernard Sanders would appear to be in that category. However, those people overlook the act that the vast majority of corporations in the United States are not large corporations on the stock exchanges, but rather relatively small businesses that have chosen the corporate form of doing business. There are many examples of such businesses in every town in Green County. Do the proponents of the amendment understand that the wording of their proposed amendment would mean that those local businesses would forfeit all of their valuable Constitutional protections? This is what leads to tyranny in the form of an all powerful government. Aversion and reaction to tyranny is what led to the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution in the first place.

Very truly yours,

Paul W. Voegeli