Should Corporations Have Constitutional Rights?

Citizens United unleashed unlimited corporate political spending: super PACs spent $2.9 billion in the 2022 midterms, with a significant portion from undisclosed corporate sources. The evidence that this spending shapes policy — not just elections — is strong. Corporate donors to both parties have achieved favorable regulatory treatment, tax provisions, and trade rules. Constitutional protection for this spending is not protecting speech; it is protecting the power to buy outcomes.

The original constitutional text nowhere mentions corporations. The doctrine of corporate constitutional personhood derives from a 19th-century judicial innovation — a headnote added by a court reporter to an 1886 Supreme Court case that did not actually decide the question. Congress has the power, and the constitutional basis, to limit corporate electoral spending and corporate constitutional protections through statute, as most democratic countries have already done.

Corporate constitutional rights create a systemic asymmetry: corporations can assert constitutional rights that their human members cannot waive. A shareholder who disagrees with a corporation's political spending cannot opt out — their capital funds speech they may oppose. The result is that corporations are treated as speakers with rights, but without the individual moral agency that justifies constitutional protection in the first place.