So you may have heard about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to reverse longstanding limitations that banned corporations from directly contributing financially in elections. It’s kind of a big deal.

As reported in the Washington Post, for a few decades now, corporations have been limited to contributing to political action committees, which have set limits of $5,000 per calendar year, and kept corporations away from contributing to a candidate directly. Of course, there are always loopholes: Corporations have a way of strongly suggesting to its rising stars that contributing to a certain campaign would probably be good for the old career. Maybe even those employees’ bonuses later in the year will reflect an additional amount of the same sum they contributed. So you’ve got a few execs writing $5,000 checks to a Political Action Committee. It’s disingenuous, but tolerable. The limits for individual campaigns are even narrower: $2,400 per candidate, per election.

The McCain-Feingold Act, passed in 2002, tightened restrictions even further. The biggest tooth it sinks into corporations is the ban on them from contributing to PACs that engage in electioneering, ads that try to sink or float a particular campaign but don’t come from one candidate or the other. Even better, McCain-Feingold bans corporations from contributing, even if it hands off money to a PAC and says it doesn’t want to know what it’s going to be used for [wink, wink; nudge, nudge].

Wait, wait. I keep using the present tense. I apologize.

You can understand; until last Thursday, this was the way it was. I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it.

Whahappenedwhas that the Supreme Court, apparently led by secretly-inducted justice Timothy Geitner, ruled last week that corporations have the right to spend freely and without limit in campaigns to oppose or support candidacies. The proponents in the 5-4 decision presented their opinion as a move to remove the government from regulating political speech, as cloaked in a larger bid to uphold the freedom of speech guaranteed to all citizens in the First Amendment. The four dissenting justices suggested that the Four Horsemen were en route to America.

So now, lobbyists hired by corporations can approach elected officials and threaten them into complying with the corporate wishes. How? Imagine, this: The Senate has a bill that increases water quality standards that tightens restrictions on dumping waste from pharmaceutical production. Big Pharma doesn’t like this, because it will cost them money to retrofit their production facilities with better waste management systems. So their lobbyist goes from Senate office to Senate office letting each one know they can look forward to unlimited spending on advertising to sink them during their next campaign if they don’t vote against the bill. Do you see? Last Thursday, the Supreme Court gave corporations unfettered discretion over all levels of American government.

Why, one wonders, would the Supreme Court grant free speech to a corporation? Its employees are guaranteed free speech, including wallet talk. Why would a corporation get the same protection from the Constitution as a human being?

The short answer is that corporations actually are viewed as artificial people under the eyes of the law. There’s a term for it, corporate personhood, and it’s been hammered out in the favor of American corporations in the courts over the last century and a half.

Back in 1868, Congress ratified the 14th Amendment, which gave equal protection under the law to all persons. It was intended as a blanket law to promote as citizens newly freed slaves, who were still being held down by states’ Jim Crow laws. The problem was, corporations had already been seen as artificial persons under custom for centuries.

The stage was set for Constitutional protection for corporations, but it wasn’t until 1886 that it was solidified by a clerical addition that never should have happened. The Supreme Court had adopted a habit of explicitly not addressing the issue of corporate Constitutional protection, despite corporations bringing it to their doorstep with every case they could get in front of the court. So the court’s reporter decided to settle the issue himself.

The reporter, a guy named J.C. Bancroft Davis, added a note on the court documents for the case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. The case was about who could tax an interstate corporation, and the Chief Justice had included a note that the court had avoided the issue of corporate rights. But Davis, who had ties to railroads, added a headnote that said, “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Nowhere in the actual case files was there any discussion of such a decision. Davis just added it. Headnotes aren’t legally-binding, but even a jotting on a Supreme Court document holds legal weight, and the note’s presence opened the doors for successful arguments in favor of Constitutional protection for corporations.

And here we are today. Slavery wasn’t uprooted by the 14th Amendment; it was expanded.

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