9 Feb 2012 11:50 pm
Here is a very interesting article about how corporations hijacked the 14th Amendment (meant to secure the political rights of former slaves) in an attempt to establish corporate personhood.The Fourteenth Amendment offered an opportunity to advance corporate interests, and the corporate attorneys set out to exploit it.In what was to become a familiar assertion, railroads in Illinois complained in the State Railroad Tax Cases that the Illinois tax laws violated due process because corporations were taxed differently.In Kentucky Railroad Tax Cases the assertion again was made that taxes violated a railroad’s due process rights. The assertion was also made - for at least the third time before the Supreme Court – that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.The corporate legal campaign to gain ‘personhood’ status finally succeeded when the report of the opinion in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific. R.R. contained a statement purportedly made by Chief Justice Waite before oral argument that “the court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State todeny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” The statement is suspect because the issue was argued. The case was decided on other grounds and the Court directly declined to decide the Constitutional question. Justice Field cited Santa Clara as holding that corporations are persons in a later case , and that notion of Santa Clara’s holding has stuck.http://reclaimdemocr...hammerstrom.pdfOnce again it all comes back to Chief Justice Waite's court reporter (J.C. Bancroft Davis) who wrote in his headnotes that the court had ruled that corporations were considered persons under the 14th Amendment. They didn't.Here's what happened.Santa Clara County in California was trying to levy a property tax against the Southern Pacific Railroad. The railroad gave numerous reasons why it shouldn't have to pay, one of which rested on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause: the railroad was being held to a different standard than human taxpayers. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Morrison Waite supposedly prefaced the proceedings by saying, "The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." In its published opinion, however, the court ducked the personhood issue, deciding the case on other grounds. Then the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, stepped in. Although the title makes him sound like a mere clerk, the court reporter is an important official who digests dense rulings and summarizes key findings in published "headnotes." (Davis had already had a long career in public service, and at one point was president of the board of directors for the Newburgh & New York Railroad Company.) In a letter, Davis asked Waite whether he could include the latter's courtroom comment--which would ordinarily never see print--in the headnotes. Waite gave an ambivalent response that Davis took as a yes. Eureka, instant landmark ruling. Does this flaky procedure mean all later cases relying on Santa Clara are null and void? Nope--in the world of the law, a precedent is a precedent, even if it's a stupid one.LinkAnd it is a stupid one. Edited by MistyBlue, 10 February 2012 - 12:57 AM.