Election Protection and Integrity in Campaign Finance ACSWP (2016)

Without claiming to be a judicial body, but in accord with our understanding of the impacts of concentrated power on the common good, the General Assembly affirms the words of the Supreme Court in 1990 in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce as it spoke in favor of the government having a compelling interest in legislation to prevent or restrain: “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” As a corollary, the assembly supports measures and judgments that distinguish clearly between technical corporate personhood and the personhood of individual citizens, and opposes laws and rulings that allow the spending or communications of corporations and other private enterprises to be considered free speech, necessary to it, or otherwise accorded the rights due human persons.