Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon

Presidents never did that before, but the Supreme Court says corporations are people.

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014 the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed?

Actually no, they don’t. But as of now they can get presidential pardons.

The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886 the high court ruled, in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad, that corporations were covered by the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the 14th amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”

Santa Clara was used, for example, to justify the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a sort of Citizens United precursor in which corporations were granted the right to spend unlimited funds on ballot initiatives. The dissenter in that case, weirdly, was the future conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Rehnquist wasn’t ordinarily a guy to lose sleep over excessive corporate power. But in this instance he worried the majority opinion........

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