Historian uncovers a 140-year-old legal secret behind today's political chaos

Source: Alternet.org · Bias: Left

Summary

President Donald Trump has already made it clear he plans on rigging the 2026 midterm elections. From trying to implement a multitude of voter suppression measures (like purging voter roles, demanding voter ID, sending troops to the polls, seizing ballot boxes and interfering with mail-in voting) to refusing to give a whit about public opinion, Trump is obviously worried that if the American people have a say, they will put Democrats in control of one or both chambers of Congress.Yet he is not merely doing this to maintain his own personal hold on power. Trump is a man with a plan — the same plan, not coincidentally, that America’s rich and powerful have worked on for more than a century. To better understand this agenda, AlterNet had an in-depth interview with historian Thom Hartmann, whose new book Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told addresses these very topics. While he has plenty of rough words for Trump, Who Killed the American Dream? is far more than just another anti-MAGA book. In great detail, Hartmann lays out how the fascist plutocracy that Trump is trying to make into a literal dictatorship has its roots all the way back in the 19th century.This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.MATTHEW ROZSA: First, your book focuses on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, and argues that from this case all the way through Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, there has been an anti-democratic pattern of the Supreme Court acting like corporations have the same rights as people. Can you elaborate, in layperson's terms, why this jurisprudential assumption has been so toxic?THOM HARTMANN: Sure.For the first, basically, 100 years of the Republic, everybody understood that there were two kinds of persons: natural persons and artificial persons. Natural persons are you and me, human beings — we have protections in the Constitution, and we even have rights specified in the Constitution through the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Artificial persons were corporations and nonprofits and churches and other kinds of entities that were not human, but had to have some sort of personhood status in order to pay taxes, sign contracts, sue or be sued, open checking accounts, things like that. And that distinction was always quite clear. In 1886, the railroads tried to argue that they were being unfairly taxed between two different counties in California because the tax rates were different, and that this was not equal protection under the law, which is what the 14th Amendment says all persons are entitled to.The court did not rule in their favor, at least with regard to that argument in that case. But the clerk of the court and one of the Supreme Court justices conspired to assert that it had. And that assertion, which was in the headnote of the 1886 decision, kind of lay around like a hand grenade until it was picked up by Lewis Powell in 1978 with the Bellotti v. Baird decision, and then really set off with the Reagan Revolution — John Roberts, the Reagan Justice Department, and then the Supreme Court. I think Citizens United in 2010 is probably the most classic example of it. Now, to more directly answer your question: the reason a corporation can pour money into a politician or a political campaign to get a politician elected who will do their bidding is because the Supreme Court has since ruled that corporations have rights under the First Amendment, and those rights include the right to free speech.But because a corporation doesn't have a mouth, they did this workaround, saying, "Well, its money is the same thing as its mouth, so it can speak with its money." There's another example, under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment says the government cannot invade your privacy unless somebody swears before a judge that there's reason to believe you committed a crime. Well, Dow Chemical was illegally venting benzene into the air over one of their chemical factories, and the EPA found out about it and flew an airplane over the factory to photograph it and use it as evidence to stop them. Dow Chemical sued and took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, Dow Chemical has privacy rights. So now it's almost impossible for the federal government, or state governments for that matter, to do surprise inspections of factories and polluting facilities, et cetera.Corporations have also claimed rights under the Fifth Amendment, which says you cannot be forced to testify against yourself and that the government can't take your assets without due process of law — that they don't have to admit to crimes in court, they don't have to testify in ways that could hurt them, and that the government can't take their property if they commit crimes.

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Historian uncovers a 140-year-old legal secret behind today's political chaos
Alternet.org

Historian uncovers a 140-year-old legal secret behind today's political chaos

Left

President Donald Trump has already made it clear he plans on rigging the 2026 midterm elections. From trying to implement a multitude of voter suppression measures (like purging voter roles, demanding voter ID, sending troops to the polls, seizing ballot boxes and interfering with mail-in voting) to refusing to give a whit about public opinion, Trump is obviously worried that if the American people have a say, they will put Democrats in control of one or both chambers of Congress.Yet he is not merely doing this to maintain his own personal hold on power. Trump is a man with a plan — the same plan, not coincidentally, that America’s rich and powerful have worked on for more than a century. To better understand this agenda, AlterNet had an in-depth interview with historian Thom Hartmann, whose new book Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told addresses these very topics. While he has plenty of rough words for Trump, Who Killed the American Dream? is far more than just another anti-MAGA book. In great detail, Hartmann lays out how the fascist plutocracy that Trump is trying to make into a literal dictatorship has its roots all the way back in the 19th century.This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.MATTHEW ROZSA: First, your book focuses on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, and argues that from this case all the way through Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, there has been an anti-democratic pattern of the Supreme Court acting like corporations have the same rights as people. Can you elaborate, in layperson's terms, why this jurisprudential assumption has been so toxic?THOM HARTMANN: Sure.For the first, basically, 100 years of the Republic, everybody understood that there were two kinds of persons: natural persons and artificial persons. Natural persons are you and me, human beings — we have protections in the Constitution, and we even have rights specified in the Constitution through the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Artificial persons were corporations and nonprofits and churches and other kinds of entities that were not human, but had to have some sort of personhood status in order to pay taxes, sign contracts, sue or be sued, open checking accounts, things like that. And that distinction was always quite clear. In 1886, the railroads tried to argue that they were being unfairly taxed between two different counties in California because the tax rates were different, and that this was not equal protection under the law, which is what the 14th Amendment says all persons are entitled to.The court did not rule in their favor, at least with regard to that argument in that case. But the clerk of the court and one of the Supreme Court justices conspired to assert that it had. And that assertion, which was in the headnote of the 1886 decision, kind of lay around like a hand grenade until it was picked up by Lewis Powell in 1978 with the Bellotti v. Baird decision, and then really set off with the Reagan Revolution — John Roberts, the Reagan Justice Department, and then the Supreme Court. I think Citizens United in 2010 is probably the most classic example of it. Now, to more directly answer your question: the reason a corporation can pour money into a politician or a political campaign to get a politician elected who will do their bidding is because the Supreme Court has since ruled that corporations have rights under the First Amendment, and those rights include the right to free speech.But because a corporation doesn't have a mouth, they did this workaround, saying, "Well, its money is the same thing as its mouth, so it can speak with its money." There's another example, under the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment says the government cannot invade your privacy unless somebody swears before a judge that there's reason to believe you committed a crime. Well, Dow Chemical was illegally venting benzene into the air over one of their chemical factories, and the EPA found out about it and flew an airplane over the factory to photograph it and use it as evidence to stop them. Dow Chemical sued and took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, Dow Chemical has privacy rights. So now it's almost impossible for the federal government, or state governments for that matter, to do surprise inspections of factories and polluting facilities, et cetera.Corporations have also claimed rights under the Fifth Amendment, which says you cannot be forced to testify against yourself and that the government can't take your assets without due process of law — that they don't have to admit to crimes in court, they don't have to testify in ways that could hurt them, and that the government can't take their property if they commit crimes.

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