BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
Debt deal was democracy in action, not "extortion."

"On the debt ceiling deal." The Economist. August 1st, 2011: "Paul Krugman is flipping his wig over this hand-waving, non-binding promise to mildly decrease the future rate of spending growth. Not only will the debt-ceiling deal retard growth, Mr Krugman argues, but "by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.' Where Mr Krugman sees 'raw extortion' tending toward 'banana-republic status' I see 'democracy'. Kindred Winecoff points us to this insightful piece by Sean Theriault, a professor of government at the University of Texas, who argues that our members of Congress are acting exactly as they were elected to.' Mr Theriault says that message voters sent to Congress in the 2010 elections came through loud and clear."
US debt deal reaffirms core social institutions.

Daniel Markovitz. "How the GOP lost on the debt deal." Los Angeles Times. August 2nd, 2011: "Progressives have reason to lament the incremental cuts in the deal. But that which does no kill a social contract may make it stronger. And neither progressives nor the country should lose sight of the fact that the core institutions of ours — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — have all been reaffirmed."
Deal is purely spending cuts when public wants mix.

Diane Lim Rogers. "Is this really a raw deal for Democrats?" The Christian Science Monitor. August 3rd, 2011: "It’s particularly notable that the deal is all spending cuts when public opinion clearly wanted a mix of tax increases and spending cuts. In just the most recent example of this fact, a July 18-20 CNN/ORC International poll showed that almost two-thirds of respondents preferred a deal with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Only 34% preferred a debt reduction plan based solely on spending reductions."
Debt deal cuts spending too early for recovery

Paul Krugman. "The President Surrenders." The New York Times. July 31st, 2011: "Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond. The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record."
Debt deal averts crisis of Congress' own making.

Robert de Neufville. "Congress' bad debt ceiling deal." Big Think. August 2nd, 2011: "By passing a deal to raise the debt ceiling, Congress averted a crisis that is entirely of the own making. If Congress had failed to reach an agreement, it would have forced the government to shut down essential services as well as to default on many of its financial obligations. What people usually call “default”—not paying investors who have loaned the government money—could probably have been avoided for a while, but only at the cost of not sending out Medicare reimbursements or giving soldiers their paychecks. Failure to reach an agreement would have done long-term damage to the U.S. position in the world economy, forced the government to pay more interest on its debt, and probably plunged the faltering economy into another real depression. But it’s not as if Congress acted to avert an asteroid. There would have been no crisis at all if Congress simply agreed to spend the money it had already voted to spend. The federal government is not otherwise about to default on its debts."
Surrender on debt deal emboldens GOP to continue extorting.

Paul Krugman. "The President Surrenders." The New York Times. July 31st, 2011: "Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here."
Sweeping statements against the debt deal.

Paul Krugman. "The President Surrenders." The New York Times. July 31st, 2011: "For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status."
Deal needed only start deficit reductions.

Some seem to have grandiose expectations for the debt deal; that it somehow failed to fully address all US economic, tax, and deficit problems. Yet, all it really needed to do was prevent default and make a solid first step in addressing the deficit problems. It does this. More can be done later, but a commitment to cut $2.4 trillion over the next decade certainly sets the right tone. It is also designed so that the cuts are less significant in the next couple of years when the economic recovery would suffer most from deeper cuts.
Liberals lost in deal w/ no tax increases, sharp cuts.

Chris Cillizza. "The debt ceiling winners and losers." Washington Post. July 31st, 2011: "Liberals: As the basic framework of the deal emerged, liberals began voicing their discontent about a bargain that left their side wanting more. With no revenue in the initial phase of the legislation and Medicare cuts on the table in the second phase, there’s not much for the ideological left to celebrate."
Debt deal doesn't cut spending enough to solve deficit

Jerry Moran, Sen R-KS. "Debt deal not good for America." KSALLink.com. August 2nd, 2011: "This plan may be considered a good deal in Washington, D.C., but it is not a good deal for the future of America. There are virtually no spending cuts in this bill – in fact, it only slows slightly the growth of spending. The amount of spending that is reduced is about $21 billion next year. Given the fact that we borrow $4 billion more each day than what we take in – those savings will disappear in less than a week. It’s unfortunate the country has been through this long drama about raising the debt ceiling and it’s even sadder that the accomplishments are so few.”
Tax deal was win for wealthiest and their lobbyists.

"Deal beats default, but delays reckoning." Kansas City Editorial. August 2nd, 2011: "The deal calls for a first installment of savings, about $900 billion worth, from spending cuts alone. It leaves untouched the more-than $1 trillion per year in tax breaks benefiting individuals and businesses. That sound you heard Sunday night was the clink of champagne glasses from lobbyists toasting the deal."
With long-term savings locked, US can refocus on jobs.

Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary. "Compromise achieved, reform’s the next chapter." Washington Post. August 3rd, 2011: "By locking in long-term savings, Congress will have more room in the fall to pass additional short-term measures to strengthen the economy — such as extending the payroll tax cut, which provides an average of a thousand dollars to the after-tax incomes of working Americans; extending unemployment benefits; and financing infrastructure investments. After all, strengthening growth and putting more Americans back to work are among the most important things we can do to improve our fiscal situation today and over the long term."
Debt ceiling helps Obama appeal to moderates.

Chris Cillizza. "The debt ceiling winners and losers." Washington Post. July 31st, 2011: "President Obama: The president needed a deal of some sort to prove that he was capable of making the government work — even if it took until the eleventh (and a half) hour to strike the compromise. Liberals are likely to be deeply unhappy about the nature of the deal, which includes no increases in taxes or revenue. But remember that Obama’s target constituency in 2012 is not his base but rather independent and moderate voters. And those fence-sitters love compromise in almost any form."
Debt deal is better than nothing.

Michael Tanner. "Better Than Nothing. But not much." National Review Online. August 3rd, 2011: "It could be worse. President Obama started out the year calling for an increase in government spending. Instead, the deal included cuts or at least reductions in the rate of spending growth. And, Republicans stood firm against any tax increase. Putting defense cuts on the table is long overdue. And a precedent has been set. Call it the Boehner Rule: Future increases in the debt ceiling will almost certainly have to include additional spending cuts."
Slashing spending hurts economy, revenues, and thus deficit.

Paul Krugman. "The President Surrenders." The New York Times. July 31st, 2011: "Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker."
The idea of corporations being "people" is absurd

Molly Morgan, a member of the leadership team for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's: "It’s not a thing, it’s just an abstraction and that’s part of the reason that the strategy of corporate personhood was a brilliant one - they created this artificial thing that could be endowed with any kind of powers and any kind of characteristics. Corporations can live forever and live in many nations at once and cut off parts of themselves and this is the entity they have given legal rights and personhood to."[3]
Personhood is legal distinction applicable to humans and corps.

Personhood is simply a legal distinction. It can be given to humans and to corporations, to define both as legal entities deserving of certain rights, protections, responsibilities, and liabilities as a consequence of wrong-doing. While many react to the idea of "corporate personhood" as ridiculous, it's important to think of it as simply a legal distinction which does not mean to conflate a human-being with a corporation.
Depriving companies of free speech is anti-business

Ellis Washington, "Dred Scott and corporate personhood." World Net Daily. January 30, 2010: "According to Jonah Goldberg's 2007 book, "Liberal Fascism," progressivism "is a civil religion run by an all powerful God-state." The "United Citizens v. FEC" case has rightly restored personhood status of American businesses and corporations according to the original intent of the Constitution's framers while taking away a potent weapon of the progressive movement – silencing Big Business."
Corps. not full community-members, ineligible for personhood

Jim Sleeper. "Corporate free speech? Since when?" Boston Globe. September 5, 2009: "corporate speech [...] isn’t free because corporations, unlike individuals, are not full-fledged members of the community. As inanimate entities, they are incapable of what the political philosopher Michael Sandel calls 'a willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the sake of the common good, and the ability to deliberate well about common purposes and ends.'"
Corp personhood means bad CEOs are guilty of murder

Rob Warmowski. "Kill a company, face murder charges." Huffington Post. January 22, 2010: "Now that the personhood of corporations has been sustained, expanded and leveraged by Supreme Court right-wing activists, what are other ramifications? [...] Shouldn't it follow that when a corporation is bankrupted -- killed -- by its reckless management that its executives could be found guilty of the capital crime of murder?"
Dictionaries include corporations in definitions of persons

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a person as: "one (as a human being, a partnership, or a corporation) that is recognized by law as the subject of rights and duties."[1] To contend that "personhood" cannot or has never been linguistically applied to corporations is, therefore, clearly false. While the debate can continue on other grounds, it is plain that the idea of corporate personhood has been long-standing, even if not widely accepted.
Corps have no moral consciences like persons.

A critical element of having rights within the social compact is that an individual has a moral conscience. This is because only entities with moral consciences can be trusted to fully uphold the social compact. Corporations do not have this moral conscience. This is partly because they simply are not human beings, but organizations that are specifically designed to make money and maximize profits. And, because they do not have moral consciences like humans, they should not be given the rights of ordinary persons.
Bad precedent against personhood should be personhood

Damon Root. "Activism in defense of free speech is no vice." Reason Magazine. September 2, 2009: "There's nothing sacrosanct about bad precedent or lousy legislation. In fact, it's the Court's basic responsibility to strike down those laws and precedents that run afoul of the Constitution—regardless of how long they've been on the books. Remember that the Court's notorious ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld the racist doctrine of "separate but equal," stood for nearly six decades before it was voided by Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Sometimes "the court's own precedents" simply deserve to be nullified."
Individuals create corporations, giving them rights

Bradley Smith. "Corporations Are People, Too." NPR. September 10, 2009: "Corporations have rights because natural persons have rights. It is sometimes said that corporations are "creations of the state," but that's not really true. Corporations are created by people — they are merely recognized by the state. True, corporations get some benefits from the state, such as limited liability and perpetual life, but in our modern society, most people get benefits from the state."
Corporations are not natural persons, so have fewer rights

David Newquist. "The grammar of libel." Kelo. January 30, 2010: "To contend that a corporation, which is a political contrivance of humans with an agenda, is in any way a person is to fly in the face of an essential linguistic and semantic distinction that is deeply rooted in the language. [...] The English lexicon has from its inception defined a person as a human, an individual of specified character, the personality of a human self. To contend that a corporation, which is a political contrivance of humans with an agenda, is in any way a person is to fly in the face of an essential linguistic and semantic distinction that is deeply rooted in the language."
Corporations traditionally have limited rights

"The rights of corporations." New York Times Editorial. September 21, 2009: "The courts have long treated corporations as persons in limited ways for some legal purposes. They may own property and have limited rights to free speech. They can sue and be sued. They have the right to enter into contracts and advertise their products. But corporations cannot and should not be allowed to vote, run for office or bear arms. Since 1907, Congress has banned them from contributing to federal political campaigns — a ban the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld."
Corporations have a right to defend their interests

Bradley Smith. "Corporations Are People, Too." NPR. September 10, 2009: "Corporations are associations of individuals, with a right to defend their interests. For example, suppose a small manufacturer would be bankrupted unless it can receive government funds under the stimulus plan passed earlier this year. If the governor refuses to accept stimulus funds, shouldn't the corporation — as a corporation, an association of shareholders — be able to criticize that governor, and even advocate his defeat?"
Too much greed and too much power of corporations is undesirable.

Corporations are usually made purely to earn money. Since corporations are inventions purely for the purpose of making money, they therefore can´t have human rights. It is like if a fireman meddles in the sorting of library books, or if a policeman fixes the sewer system. The society is left in chaos, since the money-earning corporations vote for legislation that suits only them. Also, if these corporations (which are already powerful enough) enhance their power with the right to say, then the world will be overrun by greedy, fat, cash-filled corporations which will leave the common people, farmers, working class, and all the poor, honest, hard-working people exploited.
Corps have some rights, but not all given to persons.

That corporations are not persons, according to a September 21, 2009 New York Times editorial, "does not mean that corporations should have no rights. It is in society’s interest that they are allowed to speak about their products and policies and that they are able to go to court when another company steals their patents. It makes sense that they can be sued, as a person would be, when they pollute or violate labor laws. [...] The law also gives corporations special legal status: limited liability, special rules for the accumulation of assets and the ability to live forever. These rules put corporations in a privileged position in producing profits and aggregating wealth. Their influence would be overwhelming with the full array of rights that people have."[2]
Corporations have hijacked the 14th Amendment

Doug Hammerstrom. "The highjacking of the 14th amendment.": "Corporations, on the other hand, hijacked the Fourteenth Amendment and have used it to consolidate their power in the U.S. and the world. Corporations have gained many of the inalienable rights of humans guaranteed by the Bill of Rights with their status as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment. Through their right of free speech they have captured our and regulatory agencies. They have used the key to the courts that the Fourteenth Amendment provides them to invalidate legislation that might have slipped through their control of the legislative process." This argument has led many to argue and propose a constitutional amendment clarifying that corporations are not persons under the 14th amendment.
Corporations are property; should have few rights

Manual Garcia. "Corporate free speech." Counter Punch. January 22, 2010: "People have human rights and they have property rights, but property itself has no rights; it is by definition not-human (the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime; property is stuff and livestock). People can form private clubs of pooled property -- corporations -- because these are profitable ways of engaging in commerce. But, by bending law to debase the definition of a human being so as to bestow "personhood" on pooled property clubs, we dehumanize society. In brief: people have rights and property does not; and accumulated property does not shield the individual from responsibility for the consequences of their acts. [...] We take each of these principles to disqualify corporations from legal consideration as 'persons.'"
Employees transfer many of their rights to corps

"Chapter 3 - Should Corporations Have Rights?": "[The] reason why corporate autonomy should be protected by rights is that individuals who exercise corporate autonomy by acting as a corporation forfeit some of their own autonomy in doing so. For instance, shareholders give up the right to control their own property, and employees their own labour. On a deeper, psychological level, members of a corporation are forced to accept organisational roles and objectives that may conflict with their authentic selves,4 and must adopt role distance to shield their personal integrity. The fact that corporate power compromises individual autonomy has long been recognised, and has been received with varying degrees of pessimism.6 My own view is more positive. Members of a corporation who forego their individual autonomy in order to join it do so because they with to become part of a larger autonomous entity. In a sense, members of a corporation oluntarily "transfer" a portion of their own autonomy to the corporation in order that they may share in its autonomy instead. Looked at in this way, to refuse to protect the autonomy of a corporation would be to depreciate the value of the autonomy given up by its members."
Corporations have no "right" to a voice in democracy

Dale Pendell. "The Magic of Corporate Personhood." Huffington Post. January 29, 2010: "But there is nothing inevitable about the corporation in its present form. It is not a necessary part of capitalism, nor of civilization, nor of technological progress. It can be dissolved by legal writ, the same way it was created. The corporation is not equivalent to "free enterprise," in fact is inimical to such. There is no divine reason that stock companies or other collective endeavors should have the right to meddle in politics, to buy other companies, or, indeed, to engage in any other business than that for which they were specifically created, and for which we, the citizens, have relieved the investors of liability and assumed it ourselves. [...] I, for one, would be happier if the entity to which I contract my labor were chartered to focus on production and service, for the common good, and that politics be left to citizens. That's called democracy, and is still an idea worth trying."
Super-human life makes corps ineligible for rights

Manuel Garcia. "Corporate personhood and political free speech." January 22-24, 2010: "corporations can outlive a normal human lifetime, and so have a temporal advantage over actual humans: corporations can use delay till a human contender's money is spent, or life expended. Of course, the best insurance for corporations is to use the wealth invested in them, and their possibly superhuman lifetimes, to acquire dominating political influence so as to shape the government and the laws to their particular economic advantage."
Corporate rights protect owners from liability.

Corporations have a 'legal personality' for the purposes of conducting business while shielding individual stockholders from personal liability (i.e., protecting personal assets which were not invested in the corporation). Without such protection, corporations would face significantly more challenging barriers to market entry and survival, which effectively narrows the scope of competition in the marketplace. Less competition in the marketplace comes at the cost of the consumer who will have to select from a narrower variety of choices.
One-party rule increases govt intrusions on civil liberties

Lisa Snell. "Divided We Stand". Reason Online. February 2007 - "Every American concerned about excessive government intrusion into our lives should greet with optimism the return to a system of partisan checks and balances[...]The last four years have witnessed an unprecedented level of government interference in individual lives. While National Security Agency wiretapping and detainee rights have attracted much attention, examples of abuse of power in other arenas abound, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration’s raids on medical marijuana patients."