An intrepid young reporter at the Boston Globe (who shall go unnamed, but whose last name rhymes, and more, with mine) informs us that US Representative Michael E. Capuano (who in retrospect should have been nominated for the Senate) has come up with a nifty way to all but nullify the recent court ruling handing the country over to the corporations. Taking his cue from the court’s “logic” that a corporation is merely an association of individuals, who therefore have a collective right to speak, he would require the corporation to get the consent of those individuals before it could do any speaking.
US Representative Michael E. Capuano is proposing to limit the impact of a Supreme Court decision on campaign financing by requiring companies to seek shareholder approval for most political donations.
“The money belongs to the shareholders,’’ said Capuano, a Somerville Democrat. “Let them make that decision.’’
The court’s ruling last week struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate money in politics, sparking outrage among advocates for tighter campaign finance rules and a rare rebuke of the court from President Obama during his State of the Union address. Capuano’s legislation would make it more difficult for companies to greatly expand their political activity.
The legislation would apply to any corporate donation of more than $10,000. Executives would have to convene a shareholder vote to get permission to spend such money for any political purposes. It would also require companies to report such expenditures quarterly to shareholders.
The devil is in the details in these things. The legislation must be crafted to prevent the possibility of a shareholder resolution giving the directors prospective carte blanche to spend money as they see fit. It has to require them to get authority for each and every proposed expenditure greater than $10,000.00, otherwise it is mere window dressing and a sham.
It will be interesting to see how the court would go about finding that sort of requirement unconstitutional, something it will surely want to do. Corporations are creatures of statute, and, at least up to now, the way in which they are organized and run internally are subject to statutory regulation. They are supposed to be run for the benefit of the shareholders, but to paraphrase John Yoo, that view has become somewhat quaint, given the way the profits are distributed these days. Still, in theory, a corporation is an association of stockholders, not CEOs, so it’s going to take all the originalist legal thinking Roberts can muster for him to unshackle his friends from the law Capuano is proposing.
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