Yeah for Corporate Personhood!

[Lemur]

Ronin, CR is correct, the Bill of Rights has every bit of force and applicability as the Constitution. Point of law, the amendments are a part of the Constitution. That's how we roll.

Personally, I find the awarding of full rights and privileges to corporations that we award to citizens problematic, both in application and origin, seeing as it was invented and inserted into the Supreme Court's records in 1886 by a court reporter. Weird but true.

Santa Clara County in California was trying to levy a property tax against the Southern Pacific Railroad. The railroad gave numerous reasons why it shouldn't have to pay, one of which rested on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause: the railroad was being held to a different standard than human taxpayers.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Morrison Waite supposedly prefaced the proceedings by saying, "The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." In its published opinion, however, the court ducked the personhood issue, deciding the case on other grounds.

Then the court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, stepped in. Although the title makes him sound like a mere clerk, the court reporter is an important official who digests dense rulings and summarizes key findings in published "headnotes." (Davis had already had a long career in public service, and at one point was president of the board of directors for the Newburgh & New York Railroad Company.) In a letter, Davis asked Waite whether he could include the latter's courtroom comment--which would ordinarily never see print--in the headnotes. Waite gave an ambivalent response that Davis took as a yes. Eureka, instant landmark ruling.

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Here's a decent Wiki article about the history, pros and cons of corporate personhood.