maybe i'm just in a leftist mood or something. but if money is speech according to the conservative court, then constitutional rights vary directly with income. now they do anyway, always one sort of argument for programs to redistribute wealth etc. but what i'm saying is that conservatives need to think about where explicitly endorsing this idea will take them. and then let's add the premise that corporations are persons - a kind of legal commonplace, but fearsomely radical if the idea is that corporations possess inherent rights in the declaration-of-independence sense, and hence if the first amendment and others apply to them.
alright start off with the idea that i and goldman sachs both have free speech. now throw in the premise that this right varies with, ranges over, or actually is money. then my right is shockingly negligible and circumscribed. we might say that goldman sachs has ten million times as much right to free speech as i have, approximately. in part, i admit, this is simply a statement of antecedent fact rather than some sort of normative program. but these things cannot all be true at once: a corporation is a man. all men are created equal, that is, they have certain inalienable rights. money is speech.
i would like to do an excursus, for one thing on individualism and the relation of corporatism to communism, but instead i will say: the decision makes the most basic ideas on which the american republic is founded entirely incoherent. it makes the basic american political vision inyourface absurd. that, one would think, should have given the court some pause.
the immediate conclusion is that the spirit of the founders requires a total insurrection against corporate capitalism. now however you may feel about that, i don't think that that can be the conclusion to which anthony kennedy desires to lead us. so i'd suggest the need to re-think the basic thrust.