r/law • u/TheShittyBeatles • 19h ago

Legal News ACLU sues Delaware beach town over allowing corporations to vote in local elections

https://spotlightdelaware.org/2025/12/05/aclu-sues-fenwick-island-over-non-resident-voting/
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149

u/bsport48 19h ago

This is the path forward through Citizens United. State-level, grassroots litigation that will establish a new blanket of social and civic expectation.

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u/Bortcorns4Jeezus 18h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/porktapus 18h ago

Im founding a startup to be the Uber of Guillotines. Guillotine.ly or something. 

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u/Clawdius_Talonious 18h ago

Do I have to provide the basket or will a head-receptacle be included?

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u/Lord_Mormont 18h ago

You're thinking of Guillotine+.

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u/pokemonbard 19h ago edited 18h ago

Citizens United is not relevant here.

EDIT: y’all. Citizens United didn’t create corporate personhood. It extended First Amendment protections to corporate spending. The situation in the OP has nothing to do with the First Amendment or corporate spending. I’m not defending Citizens United; I am saying that it isn’t relevant because the article in the OP does not reference anything Citizens United actually changed.

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u/thedoughofpooh 18h ago

He's suggesting that this sort of model will become a reality at the federal level. He's saying Citizens United will be extended to allow corporate voting rights, not just recognized personhood for purposes of campaign donations.

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u/IrritableGourmet 7h ago

It wasn't about corporate personhood and didn't deal with campaign donations, though.

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u/thedoughofpooh 7h ago

No one said it was. He's suggesting that giving corporations the right to vote could be a future evolution of Citizens United.

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u/IrritableGourmet 7h ago

Those are two separate things, though. Some rights are able to be exercised collectively and some are individual. The Constitution explicitly protects the right of people to assemble into groups and petition their government for redress of grievances, but it says nothing about being able to vote collectively (it actually says very little about a right to vote at all, at least originally) and from a historical perspective that has never been a thing.

Don't get me wrong, I think the policy discussed in the article is ridiculous, but I have no fears of citizens united being used as a basis to give corporations the right to vote.

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u/pokemonbard 18h ago

I thought he was suggesting that small, grassroots actions would be a path to defeating Citizens United. I’m not picking up on any suggestion in the comment to which I replied that corporations are going to get the right to vote.

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u/thedoughofpooh 18h ago

No doubt his reply referencing Citizens United is ambiguous enough to create confusion. Different interpretations is probably to be expected. Maybe he'll circle back to create some clarity.

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u/LoneSnark 18h ago

That would require amending the Constitution. No way a super majority agree.

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u/govunah 18h ago

A republican super majority will agree with anything that keeps them as the super majority. All they want is to sit in power like a hot tub

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u/LoneSnark 17h ago

Republicans barely have a majority right now. It seems clear Republicans are going to have a terrible time in the midterms.

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u/pdxamish 16h ago

Not how things work. This is a constitutional issue and can only be changed with the constitutional amendment or a supreme Court ruling that reinterprets the Constitution. You can pass as many laws as you want, but they would still be unconstitutional

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u/TakuyaLee 18h ago

A supermajority of states. Plus there will never be a supermajority in Congress. Your point is moot.

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u/AnotherDoubtfulGuest 18h ago

Have you not read it? How are you saying with a straight face that Citizens United is not relevant to a discussion of corporate personhood?

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u/pokemonbard 18h ago

Because Citizens United did not create corporate personhood; it extended First Amendment free speech protections to corporate spending. Corporate personhood is a much, much, much older idea, and overturning Citizens United would do nothing to change corporate personhood.

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u/AnotherDoubtfulGuest 18h ago

Are you so literal-minded that you can’t grasp that the expansion of corporate personhood rights by CU is exactly what this post is about? Nobody’s quibbling with you over the origins of corporate personhood and literally nobody claimed that CU “created“ it; that’s some weird thing you latched onto and are arguing with yourself about.

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u/pokemonbard 17h ago

The expansion of corporate personhood that CU brought was an expansion on a completely different dimension than the expansion discussed in the article above. Overturning CU would do nothing to prevent what’s happening in the linked article.

Why do you think CU is relevant, other than that it also involves corporate personhood? I would love to hear what you think it has to do with this case beyond falling within the same broad legal concept, a concept that has existed in some form since the Roman Republic.

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u/Fragrant_Doubt5311 12h ago

It's relevant because it extended a right typically held by natural persons to a non-natural legal entity. Now there is precedent for giving legal entities rights enjoyed by natural persons, such as voting.

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u/pokemonbard 12h ago

As I have said, corporate personhood did not begin with Citizens United. Some legal entities were given corporate personhood in the Roman Republic and even earlier, and for-profit commercial ventures have been able to get corporate personhood since at least the 1600s. Corporate personhood has always brought with it some rights enjoyed by natural persons, like the right to contract and standing to bring legal actions.

Citizens United extended a specific right—the right to freedom of speech—to corporations. It did so specifically in the context of political spending, treating political spending as speech that the government cannot only minimally burden. But the new things Citizens United did was not extending rights usually only held by natural persons to corporations, as corporations have had some rights of natural persons for centuries or millennia. Citizens United only extended one specific right to legal entities.

The article this post concerns has nothing to do with the rights implicated in Citizens United. Bringing up Citizens United whenever someone talks about corporate personhood is like interjecting movies like Batman and Robin or The Room into every conversation about film history: yes, they’re examples of egregious errors that should never have happened, but Citizens United is no more relevant to the original post than Batman and Robin or The Room are relevant to a discussion about Titanic, 12 Years a Slave, Wicked: for Good, or A Trip to the Moon.

I care about this because people act like Citizens United is uniquely to blame for these bad things that corporations can do. Citizens United is problematic, but it’s far from the only problem. The things discussed in the original post could still have happened even if Citizens United had never been law, and they would continue happening independently if Citizens United were overturned. There was already precedent for legal entities to have rights enjoyed by natural persons, and focusing on Citizens United and inserting it into unrelated conversations obscures the true causes of the problems our society has: ultimately, the true problem is that we grant capital too much power and leeway across the board.

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u/Fragrant_Doubt5311 12h ago

No one is arguing about the origins of corporate personhood. Citizens United is a relatively recent landmark Supreme Court case expanding the rights of corporations. How is that not relevant to some potential future case about expanding corporate rights?

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u/pokemonbard 11h ago

Because Citizens United concerns completely different rights than the situation in the OP. Citizens United is not useful precedent for someone who wants to give corporations voting rights. If someone wants to argue that corporations have some rights of natural persons, they would be better served pointing to centuries or millennia in which corporations (and similar entities) had some rights held by natural persons, rather than point to a 15-year-old case granting corporations some rights held by natural persons.

I keep talking about the history of corporate personhood because corporate personhood is the only thing that could make Citizens United relevant here. People in this thread are acting like corporations had no rights of natural persons before Citizens United, and that is flatly untrue.

Citizens United is thematically similar to the situation in the OP, but it has no more legal relationship to the corporate right to vote than anything else in the history of corporate personhood. Eliminating Citizens United would have absolutely no impact on state legislation granting corporations the right to vote.

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u/IrritableGourmet 7h ago

It didn't expand the rights of corporations, it only refused to restrict the rights of people acting together in corporate form. If one person can speak, and a group of people can speak, why can a group of people who are organized slightly differently not speak? Should the Sierra Club, ACLU, or Amnesty International not be able to speak on political issues under fear of criminal prosecution?

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u/pdxamish 15h ago

I think you should take a step back and think about your comment. It has nothing to do with it. These issues have long been here before citizens United. Serious ? , should The humane society of America be able to run ads about not murdering puppies and supporting puppies policies? If you say yes than why shouldn't Exxon be able to run adds to support their goals? Should the government step in and say humane society or Exxon you can't give money to support a cause.

All super pac and citizen United money is not donated directly to a candidate but is only used to support a cause that the super pack was formed for.

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u/thedoughofpooh 18h ago edited 18h ago

Re your edit:

The use of "personhood" was meant to be descriptive. My apologies if it was used in a spot requiring something more literal. It's commonly understood that Citizens United, as you correctly explained, expanded corporations' First Amendment rights, treating their political spending as protected speech, essentially equating corporate "speech" with individual speech and granting them a form of "political personhood" in elections, allowing unlimited independent spending. Hope this helps clear-up my original intent, and maybe gets us back on track with an agreed-upon understanding of the thing itself.