Humans are given less consideration each day. Corporations have been given powers and rights about which the Framers of our Constitution and early leaders of the United States warned. James Madison “feared that the spirit of speculation’ would lead to ‘a government operating by corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty.’” FN 1. Andrew Jackson vetoed recharter of the Second National Bank because the Act “seems to be predicated on the erroneous idea that the present stockholders have a prescriptive right not only to the favor but to the bounty of Government. ... It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”  FN 2.
   This week’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, docket number 12-536, 2014 WL 1301866, broadens the “rights” an artificial entity, created by reliance upon legislative enactment, may claim. In that decision, Chief Justice Roberts, in a 5-4 decision, wrote that the statutory aggregate limits on how much money a donor may contribute in total to all political candidates or committees violated the First Amendment.
   The decision turns on how the Supreme Court “has identified only one legitimate governmental interest for restricting campaign finances: preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption.” FN 3. The adjective “corrupt” is defined as “dishonest; without integrity; guilty of dishonesty, esp. involving bribery.”  FN 4. In McCutcheon, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, limited the notion of what could be limited as “corruption”: “...while preventing corruption or its appearance is a legitimate objective, Congress may target only a specific type of corruption—‘quid pro quo’ corruption.” FN 5. This limitation then deprives government of the ability to limit aggregate donations.
   If a large corporation invites a member of the City-County Council or the General Assembly to its suite at Lucas Oil Stadium or whatever the name is today of the basketball arena Indianapolis built for the Pacers, absent an overt quid pro quo—“If we give you free tickets, you will vote for X bill”—corruption is absent. If large corporate interests, anonymous and perhaps from another State or another nation, flood an election campaign with money, we lack means by which even to know from what or whom those donations are derived.
   The claim that, in this context, anyone can donate as much as he or she (or it) wishes is blind to a simple point. Not everyone is a billionaire. The billionaires usually obtain their wealth through inheritance, not creativity or creation. Some eighty-one percent (81%) of wealth in the United States is derived from inheritance.  FN 6. Laws then are enacted and signed into law that further protect the wealthy. Our media, hardly “left-wing” as many have been conditioned to believe, gave a fevered pitch to demands for the end to “death taxes.” Many people feared their children would be left nothing of the little those people had to pass onto their heirs. What went unmentioned was the one-time exclusion people have of over six hundred thousand dollars ($600,000.00) under the Internal Revenue Code, to pass on to heirs. Thus a person who works full-time and pays exorbitant local taxes, with Indianapolis/Marion County as an example, to pay, in part, for generous handouts to the local basketball and football cannot complete with corporate interests for suites to lawmakers.    
   Corporations were not endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Only human beings have “rights.” Others, this week, have written about corporate claims of “rights,” and questioned whether such claims mean corporations now lose the immunity for corporate acts—the “corporate veil”—that drives many to incorporate a business entity. Perhaps we can enact other legislation that will pass constitutional muster on these matters. Some hope for an amendment to the Constitution. That means enactment of such a measure in Congress, where corporate interests already are well-entrenched. Even more troublesome is the notion of a constitutional convention, presumably to re-write, wholesale, the Constitution itself.  I am afraid that such an event would be flooded with the money allowed to be given for political interests, money labeled now as “speech,” and perhaps humans would be given conditional “rights” and corporations would indeed be endowed by their Creators with whatever rights those corporations would be able to purchase.
   And the money would not be limited to “home-grown.” The money could come from anywhere. 

  1 Clements, Jeffrey D., Corporations Are Not People, Berrett-Koehler Publ., 2012, p. xii.

  2   Id., p. xiii.

  3   2014 WL 1301866, at 15.

  4   The American College Dictionary, 1962 ed., p. 273.

  5   2014 WL 1301866, at 15.

  6   Morris, Seymour, Jr., American History Revisited, Broadway Press, 2010, p. 205.