Source: https://angrybearblog.com/tag/conestoga-wood-specialties-corp-v-sebelius
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 07:08:21+00:00

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When donors furnish widely distributed support within all applicable base limits, all members of the party or supporters of the cause may benefit, and the leaders of the party or cause may feel particular gratitude. That grati­tude stems from the basic nature of the party system, in which party members join together to further common political beliefs, and citizens can choose to support a party because they share some, most, or all of those beliefs. … To recast such shared interest, standing alone, as an opportunity for quid pro quo corruption would dramatically expand government regulation of the politi­cal process.
Actually, that was a comment I posted to a Slate article last week about McCutcheon that included the above quote from that opinion. The religious-rights cases I had in mind were, of course, the Hobby Lobby Stores v. Sebelius and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius, the for-profit-corporation ACA-contraceptive-mandate cases, which were argued at the court on Mar. 25.
My early take on the ACA-contraception-mandate-case argument: Alito conflates the Securities Exchange Act with state-law corporate-structure statutes (yikes); Kennedy really, really wants to give corporations the full complement of human constitutional rights; and Scalia really, really needs to limit this ruling to an interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
When [U.S. Solicitor General Donald] Verrilli said the Court has never found a right to exercise religion for corporations, Alito wondered if there was something wrong with the corporate form that it would not be accorded religion freedom rights. Did Verrilli agree, Alito said, with a lower court’s view that the only reason for a corporation to exist was to “maximize profits?” Verrilli said no, but Alito had made his point.
— Argument recap: One hearing, two dramas, Lyle Denniston , SCOTUSblog, reporting on this morning’s Supreme court argument in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius.
That paragraph was one of two in Denniston’s recap that dismayed me, albeit only momentarily. Unquestionably, a threshold issue in these cases is whether or not the proverbial corporate veil–a shorthand legal term that conveys that the very purpose of the state-created corporate structure is a severance of the rights and liabilities of corporations from those of its shareholders–can be “pierced” in order to allow the shareholders in these two closely-held corporations to confer to the corporation their personal legal right of religious exercise under the First Amendment or under a federal statute called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the latter which expressly uses the term “person” to identify its beneficiaries. I addressed this in detail in this post here yesterday.
Among the inundation of articles about Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius in the months since the Supreme Court agreed to hear these cases–one, Hobby Lobby, in which the corporation won in the lower appellate court, the other, Conestoga Wood, in which the corporation lost–there are very among the ones I’ve read that make what I think is the critical point about these cases: the critical interplay between the Citizens United opinion and these two cases, and the reason why. It’s a point I made (or tried to) in a post on AB last fall, but Winkler is a constitutional law prof. at UCLA and, according to his mini-bio at the end of his slate article, he’s writing a book about the constitutional rights of corporations, so I was happy to read the paragraphs I quote above in an article published on a mainstream-media website.
For all the jokes about corporations attending church or being bar mitzvahed–yes, I plead guilty, but writing that post was so much fun!–the fact is that the corporations in those cases claim not that they are people but instead that they derive their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion not from the state’s grant of corporate status but rather from the constitutional rights of its shareholders. This argument–that corporations’ constitutional rights are derivative of their shareholders’ constitutional rights and therefore are not limited to, say, protecting the property that the corporation itself owns or to the ability to enter into business contracts on behalf of itself–comes courtesy of Citizens United, pure and simple. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, unlike Citizens United, are for-profit corporations. They both also are closely held, rather than publicly traded, corporations, and in both cases, the shareholders (members of a single family, in each case) are parties to the lawsuit along with the corporations themselves.
Mitt Romney’s ill-fated pronouncement that corporations are people, my friend, was funny, but it actually was an inarticulate adoption of Citizens United’s actual declaration: that corporations are “associations of citizens” whose members, as human individuals, have the familiar panoply of constitutional rights. One obvious problem with this derivative-constitutional-rights thing, though–albeit a problem that the Citizens United majority didn’t acknowledge–is that the individual shareholders of at least publicly-traded corporations don’t all hold the same political views. Some shareholders are shareholders by virtue of participation in large mutual funds, and others by dint of ownership in pension funds. Some of them even in public-union pension funds!
A seminal part of Citizens United, in other words, is its conflation of the CEO’s constitutional rights with those of the corporation’s–er, association’s–other citizens. The corporation itself may not be a person, my friend, but it derives its First Amendment rights from one (only one) of its citizen members. Or, at least, only that one member serves as proxy on the derivative rights. (If the CEO is not a citizen, he or she can still serve as proxy for human members who are.) But what the plaintiffs are arguing in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood is that these corporations derive their constitutional rights from all of these associations’ members: the family members who comprise the entire membership of this association of people.
The title of the Winkler article says that corporations are people. By which he means, they are indeed associations of citizens. Associations of citizens (and, probably, non-citizens) that, for purposes of healthcare insurance coverage, include the corporation’s employees. What Citizens United means in saying that corporations are associations of citizens is that the shareholders comprise an association of citizens whose proxy, for constitutional-rights purposes, is (apparently) its CEO. But Citizens United did not address whether this association of citizens is necessarily limited to shareholders. If corporations have constitutional rights derived from its individual members because they are associations of citizens, and if the association of citizens includes, by definition, employees as well as shareholders (no green-card holders or foreign shareholders allowed!)–and under Citizens United, there is no reason why it shouldn’t–then the act of incorporation itself confers derivatively to the corporation the constitutional rights of its employees. Who have the constitutional right to have the same benefits of the ACA as similarly situated employees of other corporations.
Okay, my eve-of-oral-argument hunch is that the court will back away somewhat from its Citizens United claim that corporate CEOs can, in the name of the corporation, access the constitutional rights of citizen-association members. The Court will find some way to segregate speech rights from other constitutional rights, and will rule against the plaintiffs in these two cases. That’s because, well, apparently a slew of other associations of citizens–e.g., the business community at large–are making it known, including in amicus briefs to the court, that they’re downright scared to death of this end-to-the-corporate-veil/corporations-are-groups-of-citizens (who can be held individually responsible for their for-profit association’s liabilities) thing.
Or maybe they’re just scared to death at the thought of ExxonMobil or Amazon marauding through their towns bearing AK-47s in exercise of their derivative Second Amendment rights. It could be time for some for-profit associations of citizens to pray.
*Paragraph edited after publication to correct a cut-and-paste error and to add the name of the referenced Supreme Court case, Harris v. Quinn.

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