Earlier this year I agreed with the Supreme Court majority decision on Citizens United that on First Amendment grounds Corporations and Unions could not be limited in their funding of campaigns.
The common argument made, which I disagreed with, was the simple one that the ruling made was that "corporations are people" and that this was ridiculous. And that the First Amendment should only, and was only meant to, apply to individuals.
I felt that the inclusion of "the press" in the original document indicates that these Rights, while grounded in the rights of the individual, did actually extend to the aggregations of individuals as well.
Fast forward to today and we have the "ground zero mosque" issue. Here as well I feel that under the First Amendment, this *organization* has the right to build their Community Center/Mosque wherever they see fit, and many are arguing the same. And it isn't because I/we think "churches are people" (or that "congregations are people"). Note, no single person is building or funding the community center. The first amendment here is getting invoked properly as applied to this group of people, and this should kill the "corporations aren't people" line of attack on the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United.
To put it in perspective, imagine the precedent had the Supreme Court ruled the opposite way on Citizens United. The decision would have been that the government can severely restrict the rights of aggregations of people, so long as the rights of the individuals are preserved in some more narrow sense.
Using this logic you could then say that the government could have the right to put restrictions on where a mosque get built, perhaps "within reason" or some vague qualifier. For instance, it would be easy to argue using this logic that the government could require the mosque be built 10 blocks away from the proposed location, as there would be little argument that it would put the individual members in a position of not being able to enjoy "free exercise" of their religion - it would be just a little extra commute (for some of them) after all. If you disagree with that, imagine it again but 1 or 2 blocks instead of 10.
Now one argument would be that churches exist for the express purpose of the exercise of religion and so it is more obvious that their rights more directly derive from the rights of the individual members. But then in the Citizens United case the Corporation in question was one that was created for the express purpose of putting out a political message. So its rights too were very directly derivative of the rights of the individuals that funded it.
Anyway, this is really a complex issue, much more so than "the Supreme Court thinks Corporations are people" line of reasoning.
Personally, I definitely do think that there is an overall problem of money and politics mixing. As I wrote about recently I think that transparency is a great part of the solution, as you saw in that recent case of Target dipping its toe into political contributions and the public backlash.
If we don't have full transparency yet on the money trail in politics we absolutely should have every measure in place to be fully transparent. The power of transparency in this age of information technology I think should not be underestimated.
I also think that it would be healthy to explore options to amend the Constitution to be more specific about rules around elections in particular since they are an aspect of the direct running of government. The bars are somewhat high to get that started, and they should be. But that mechanism is there for us to make changes that we deem important enough (but as Prohibition showed, we can certainly be temporarily pretty stupid about things).
But as far as the first amendment goes, I'm happy to have it consistently apply to individuals and to the organizations that individuals choose to create and belong to.
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