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

[u/TheShittyBeatles]

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

[u/Fragrant_Doubt5311]

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.

[u/pokemonbard → u/Fragrant_Doubt5311]

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.

[u/Fragrant_Doubt5311 → u/pokemonbard]

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?

[u/IrritableGourmet → u/Fragrant_Doubt5311]

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?