Former 9-term member of Congress writes here that:

"A minority of first graders, but a majority of the justices of our U.S. Supreme Court insist that Mr. Peanut is a real person.

In a splintered 5-4 decision, the court has ruled that private corporations are people in the exercise of the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment of the Constitution. Although those guarantees were surely meant by our founders to assure the rights of free speech to real live people and not bloodless, inanimate business ventures — not huge multinational corporations — the court has ruled otherwise.

The court’s latest decision determined that corporations may finance political television ads and they may do so in the days just prior to an election, a practice that had been denied by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. The high court’s reasoning is that campaign dollars and speech are indivisible and to prohibit corporate campaign spending truncates a “person’s” right to expression. Really? A corporation and money have the same right as a person? Holy snap, crackle and pop!

This recent tortured violation of common sense is the latest blow of one first delivered by an earlier court controlled by judges of the political far right. In an 1886 decision — Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad — the Supreme Court granted corporations the legal status of a “person.” That decision from the “Gilded Age” of money and centralized power was the precursor for the free speech finding of today’s court."