Iyi Somin says we did it to preserve newspaper corporations

In the latest Volokh post regarding Just Roberts and the Supremes.

Corporations all have public media, new releases, editorials and the like in their own media outlets. Bill Gross publishes to his customers in the PIMCO newsletter, no different than the NYT publishes editorials to its customers. The FEC had no reason, initially, to have the media exemptions.

Newspapers and media deliver news to its customers, Bill Gross delivers bond investment advice. Neither outlet is to be denied the ability to use its own media as part of its own business.

Both the newspaper and the media are prohibited, under a voluntary charter, from breaking FEC rules. Both PIMCO and the NTY have restrictions placing corporate political ads in the Washington Post. Both have the right to issue editorials to their customers.

The proper case that Citizens United needed to bring was whether corporations can be restricted access to general media outlets in reaching their customers. If they had claimed that the FEC laws were especially oppressive to corporations in the business of making political documentaries, then they may have won, in contract law court. There they could have made the appeal that the FEC laws distort due process in corporate law.

Iyi also points out that there are many state created entities. He is correct, and that is the problem. All of these state created entities exist because members voluntary give up some rights in creating them. The Roberts decision has place a risk on all these voluntary contracts, they no longer exist in legal fact unless each and every entity provides a specific manner of dealing with rights we can no longer abrogate.

And FrontPage magazine gets it wrong, quoting Shapiro at CATO:

"No one is saying that corporations are human beings. But corporations are groups of private individuals who have legal rights."

Shareholders hold a set of rights they have chosen, limitations accepted based upon a grant of limited liability received in their exercise of shareholder duty. They are not acting as just another "group of individuals".

We cannot run an economy in which CATO has every individual exercising every human right at all times. Libertarians do allow for voluntary, limited restrictions on rights.