The day the voter died. The Supreme Court disenfranchises the American voter.

American democracy is dead. The Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations have a First Amendment Right to make unlimited campaign donations. In doing so, Court effectively drowned out the voice of the people by allowing unlimited corporate profits to pour into the election process. I was shocked. Corporations have First Amendment Rights? Forgive me for my ignorance, but I thought the First Amendment secured Rights of the citizens that formed the government, not corporations which are a creation of government.

My ignorance started at an early age, in civics class to be exact. In civics class, they taught me that our forefathers, men like Jefferson, wrote a document called the Declaration of Independence which expressed the novel idea ". . .that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among "Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The distinction between men and corporations and their relation to government is important, because men create governments, not corporations. Corporations are created by governments. Giving corporations Constitutional rights equal to citizen rights is the antithesis of the Declaration of Independence, that Governments are created by men to protect the Rights of men against government and any of its creations. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that Man is endowed from birth with certain unalienable Rights. He did not say corporations. Men, not corporations are arguably created by God while corporations clearly are not. Corporations are neither "born" nor endowed by their "creator" with unalienable Rights. Corporations are legal fictions created by state law.

Our forefathers and anyone with common sense would not confuse the differences between the morality of man and the souless living fiction we call a corporation. Corporations, then and now, were creatures of the state. In the United States, corporations are creatures of state law. Federal law doesn't allow for the creation of a corporation. So, whatever Rights a corporation has are determined by the law of the state in which it is incorporated. Since a corporation has no "mother" other than the state law which creates it, it has only those Rights enumerated in the statutes under which it was chartered. The Rights of a corporation are thus not endowed by a creator and are not "unalienable" as they can be taken away at any time by the state that created it. Further, not all corporations are "created" equal, some are public, some are private, some are for profit, some are not for profit. Some states give more corporate Rights and thus lawyers spend a lot of time perusing various state laws to see where it would be most beneficial to incorporate a new corporation and what type of corporation to create. The Declaration of Independence simply was not talking about corporations having unalienable Rights. It was talking about people having Rights.

The Constitution and Bill of Rights were intended to form a limited government to protect man and his unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness from the tyranny of a government that has the power to throw him in jail, send him to war, and put him to death. Nothing was intended to protect the legal fiction we call a corporation which cannot be forced to carry a rifle into battle or put on death row. How can the First Amendment possibly be intended to allow those corporations that profit from war and running jails the Right to participate in electing officials that ultimately make the decision to go to war, order their products, sign contracts worth billions of dollars? Only living people have the First Amendment Right to participate in the election process. Why? Because it is the individual that ultimately suffers the consequences of any abuse of government power. Men and women go to war, not corporations. Men and women are buried in Arlington National Cemetary, not corporations. Men and women are the ones that go to jail, not corporations. Only those that must suffer from governmental abuse of power and not profit from it are secured the Right to vote or participate in the election process pursuant to the First Amendment.

Thus, for the US Supreme Court to hold that corporations have First Amendment Rights to participate in the election process is ludicrous and not Constitutionally based. The rights of a corporation are determined by statute and thus can be restricted by statute. The Rights of citizens, of mankind, are not. The Right of mankind to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are given by the creator and existed before the formation of government and thus cannot be restricted by the government.

The ultimate power of a citizen is the power to vote, the Right of suffrage. It is the Right to form a government by the consent of the governed. We do this at all levels of government each election day. Each election, we form a new government and thus, so long as the Right of suffrage exist, do away with the need for the bloody revolutions of history to form a government responsive to the people. The Right to vote is the Right upon which everything in a democracy rest.

It is only through the Right to vote that a people can hope to have a moral government, one that is beholden to a morality that there is right and wrong in this world, a morality that comes from something beyond ourselves and not a morality guided corporate driven profits. If the power of the vote is diluted or taken by the government in any way, then a government of the people and by the people ceases to exist. Any hope for morality in government is lost to greed. A government corrupted by anything other than the concept of God given Rights is no longer no longer morally accountable to the people that comprise it. Thomas Paine once wrote that if the people are denied their Right of suffrage they have the Right to rebel. How could war ever be justified as being in the best interest of the people if, for example, corporations could vote? A corporation does not register for the draft. It does not suffer the pain of lost of loved ones in war. It has no fear of war. In fact, it may profit from war.

According to the Supreme Court, even though corporations have no body to kick or soul to burn in hell, even though they are creatures of state statute, corporations have a First Amendment Right to participate in the election process just like you and me. This is akin to giving them the Right to vote. It disenfranchises the voter by allowing corporations, which are not beholden to our geographic boundaries and with pocket books of billions, to participate in the political process. It allows the outside interest of corporate greed into government. The only reason corporations participate in the political process is to influence the vote, get candidates elected that further their corporate purpose. Are we to think that the plane and tank manufacturers will not jump into the political process? How much profit is made on each billion dollar bomber? How much would a corporation pay to get a Senator elected who would approve the purchase of another 100 such bombers? Does a weapons manufacturer fear going to war or profit from it? They have no skin in the game of war, only profits. I, however, do. I have kids, that could go to war. I was once a soldier. Young men registering for the draft, young men and women in service now have skin in the game of war, but how can an 18 year old compete in the political process against the deep pockets of weapons manufacturers? This is but one example. There is simply no way that the voters who live here and will be interned here can compete in the political process with the deep pockets of a corporation. Our democracy will no longer be a place of competing ideologies based on human morality, but a place of competing business interests for profit. The politics of profits will replace political morality. This ruling by the Supreme Court supplants democracy and drives a stake through its heart.

We were all shocked in the last election that it would take $20 million in campaign donations just to make a presidential candidate viable. If there is now no limit to how much a corporation can donate, and since the donors are now world-wide, how much will it take, a billion? I mean, after all, if an oil company wants the lease rights to drill off of California, how much is that worth? How much does one oil rig cost? Millions I'm sure. $20 million in campaign contributions will just be the cost of doing business. The corporations will deduct the contribution as part of the capital expenditures budget. Who needs a measly $200 campaign donation from me anymore? This idea that the door is open for corporations to compete in the political process is more novel an idea than anything Jefferson ever wrote in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, it's the antithesis of the Declaration of Independence and everything our First Amendment was designed to secure, which is the idea that governments are comprised of living and breathing people, not corporations.

The travesty doesn't stop there. In a mere stroke of the pen, the Supreme Court gave First Amendment Rights to every corporation of the world to participate in the US election process. For those who worried about closing our borders, they have just been opened in a much more dangerous way, ways that we will not be able to see and guard against. Now, the Chinese, Russians and even Bin Laden can donate unlimited funds to the candidate of their choice. Don't think so? They'll pay their couple of hundred dollars and form a new corporation right here in the US to make campaign donations.

As a lawyer, I'm not going to waste my time reading the opinion justifying this corporate takeover over American politics, which is really just the formal caisson carrying away the dead body of the American voter. I've practiced law too long to waste my time reading a nefarious court decision somehow justifying giving corporations Constitutional Rights. It won't be long before the Supreme Court gives corporations the Right to vote, and that we individuals will only be counted as 3/4 of a citizen. Citizenship means nothing anymore. I have no problem with a decision that an individual has a Right to personally donate as much as he or she wants, but a corporation? Please, and to add sin upon sin, they get to deduct the expense. Where's my personal deduction for campaign donations? Do I still get to elect on my tax return to donate $1 to the presidential campaign fund?

We have a broken gov't. It doesn't work anymore. The Constitution is meaningless. It's a free for all in Washington. Washington is a cesspool. There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Waiving the banners of liberal versus conservative is the old strategy of divide and conquer. They divide the masses while in the CONgress nothing gets done. You know why? Because they don't work for you and me. They are all working for the money makers. All that fighting you see isn't fighting over political ideology. It's simply vultures fighting over the last remaining scraps of the American pie. They will feed. We will go hungry. Proof? More Americans are on food stamps than ever. More Americans are unemployed than since the Great Depression, and all this growing poverty despite the fact that every Republican and Democratic legislature and President has spent more money than their predecessor under this idea that "trickle down economics" is good for you and me. Where's all this money going? It's not trickling down to you and me. It's going into the pockets of these bankers that get fat bonuses because their banks are too big to fail. Really? I thought this was capitalism, where good business are rewarded and poorly run businesses fail. Apparently I was lied to again, because only the individual hard working American is allowed to fail, not the big corporations. They are too important, so important, they need our tax dollars to run their businesses and pay their personal bonuses. These trillions in tax dollars are trickling down and stopping at Wallstreet to reward banks that too big to fail because they created real estate bubbles that shouldn't have been created, and then they pay themselves tax dollar bonuses for doing so, bc if they didn't get million dollar bonuses, we might not be able to hire another crook to run them. I say good, let them stand in the unemployment line like the rest of us and live on food stamps, but they don't care about my opinion, nor yours.

It's with great sadness that I, a lawyer of 17 years now, a boy raised by his own personal Atticus Finch, a boy that once swore as a paratrooper to uphold and defend a Constitution, who swore again as an attorney to uphold that same Constitution, must now confess that that same Constitution no longer acts to limit the powers of the Government, but limits instead the will of the people to govern themselves, thus allowing the government to run amok.

The Constitution was a novel idea, a novel idea to create a contract between a government and its people. It was a contract whose intent was to protect its people by defining the powers of government in a written document, and in so doing, restrict the powers of the government to encroach upon the freedoms of the people who ultimately constituted that government. It was the idea that government is of the people, by the people for the people, reduced to writing, so that the powers of that government would be restricted, preserving the rights and freedoms of the people who constituted it.

Although novel in design, the ultimate effect of having a government reduced to writing meant that ultimately the people would be forced to look to its "limited government" to interpret the Contract that attempted to limit that same government. Is it any surprise then that the Presidents created by that Constitution have issued thousands upon thousands of executive orders, an authority not expressed in the Constitution, which also have the effect of law but are never approved by Congress? Is it any surprise that the Courts have ruled taxpayers do not having standing to sue their own government? Is it any surprise that the Courts have ruled there is no duty of the police to protect its citizens? Is it any surprise that the 4th Amendment is subject now to an undeclared war on terror? That the Patriot Act and various other legislation passed in the war on terror allows domestic spying without search warrants? Is it any surprise then that banks, regulated by our government, can limit withdrawals, place holds on safety deposit boxes etc? Any surprise at legislative "earmarks"? Any surprise that Congressmen always vote themselves pay raises, won't pass campaign reform, have free healthcare and wonderful retirement plans? These unexpressed powers and benefits of government service should not come as a surprise when it is the government that interprets its own "limited" powers.

In the end, reducing the government to a written Constitution did not limit our government. It did, however, turn the idea of subsequent generations away from the idea government is by the will of the people, to the idea that they had created a limited government that would, through benevolence for its people, restrict itself.

Our forefathers and our present generation falsely assume that government, that power, can be restricted or limited by a piece of paper. Reducing to writing the idea that power can be so easily restricted only acts to restrict the ideas of the people that read and believe the false notion that power can be so easily restricted. The false belief that gov't power can be so easily limited by a written Constitution has become a yoke around the necks of generations of Americans from which the nation can be pulled by the special interest that subvert it.

Chris Lisle

After I wrote this, a ABC reported that US intelligence services say they have the authority to kill US citizens that are terrorists. This is only more evidence that the Constitution is dead. The Constitution was intended to protect citizens from the government, meaning they have the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and that those rights are secured by the Bill of Rights which guarantees them, among others, due process, right to be charged, right to be judged by a jury, right to an attorney. I guess the government is now judge, jury and executioner in reserving the right to kill anyone they deem a terrorist without charge, jury, trial.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/license-kill-intelligence-chief-us-american-terrorist/story?id=9740491&page=1