"Corporate Personhood" Is Not the Problem

But the problem didn’t start with Citizens United and can’t be fixed by a corporate-personhood amendment. The threat to American self-government runs far deeper. It started nearly 40 years ago, when the Court first became involved in campaign-finance cases. Four decades of decisions have allowed the rich and powerful to transform free speech—our most important tool of bottom-up self-government—into a means of top-down social control.