THE HEADLINE of Jim Sleeper’s op-ed, “Corporate free speech? Since when?’’, asks a question but doesn’t give the answer. “Since when’’ would be since 1886 and the Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which established the precedent of treating corporations as individuals. In particular, this case gave them the protection of the 14th Amendment. While due process protection was reasonable enough, doing it in this way was not.
Building on Santa Clara (and some previous decisions of the Marshall Court), corporate entities have acquired protections that actual people have under our Bill of Rights, including free speech. It is this artificial notion of corporations that has produced the recent split among progressives over the corporate-sponsored swift-boating of Hillary Clinton in the case of “Hillary: The Movie.’’ On one side are constitutional rights advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union and on the other reformers decrying the excessive influence of powerful businesses on the political process.
What is lost is the significance of the Santa Clara decision. Despite the fact that our Founding Fathers never imagined corporations as citizens, generations of so-called conservatives have embraced this egregious example of judicial activism - mostly to fight regulation of abuses.
The solution for progressives is to make Congress give corporations the protections they need by legislation, and to explicitly reject the Santa Clara decision that made them the legal equivalent of flesh-and-blood people.
Mark Bridger
Newton 
