Senator Jon Tester today introduced a Constitutional Amendment clarifying that corporations are not "people," restoring the right of Congress to limit corporate influence in elections.
In introducing his amendment, Tester is heeding the call of Montana voters, who voted overwhelmingly in November to direct Montana's Congressional delegation to amend the U.S. Constitution to empower Congress to limit corporate spending in elections.
Tester's amendment would overturn Citizens United, the unpopular 2010 Supreme Court decision which allows corporations to spend unlimited money on political campaigns with no transparency.
Typically, Republicans, corporate prostitutes that they are, are trying to characterize this as a "repeal of the First Amendment" which of course, it is not. What it would do is clarify that the Constitution applies to individual, natural persons, not artificial legal constructs like corporations.
Perhaps the most pernicious Supreme Court musing (incidentally, NOT a descion) was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, which laid the legal groundwork for corporate "personhood." Prior to that, corporations were chartered by states, and if a corporation misbehaved, states simply yanked the corporate charter, dissolving the corporation and ruining the investors, which was pretty big stick to enforce behavior conductive to the common good. Its no coincidence that the Guilded Age and the era of the robber barons neatly bracket this decision.