The Right to Evade Regulation: How corporations hijacked the First Amendment

[Lakhota]

Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.

Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.

Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.

For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”

It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.

Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.

Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.

What people think of as the American free speech tradition, is, like civil rights and the Super Bowl, a tradition that turns out to date back only a half-century. As late as the 1950s, cities or states could ban motion pictures they found distasteful, arrest a man for calling the local sheriff a fascist, and lock up declared members of the Communist Party, all without violating the Constitution.

The shift toward free speech as we now understand it can be attributed in part to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1935, the school board in Minersville, Pennsylvania, instituted a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in its classrooms. Lillian and William Gobitas, children from a local Witness family, refused to participate, following church teaching that holds that seeking salvation from an “earthly emblem” is a sin. The Gobitas siblings were expelled. For good measure, a Catholic parish in the predominantly Catholic town announced a boycott of their parents’ store, wrecking its business. Yet when the Supreme Court took up the case, it voted eight to one against the family. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, wrote that to overturn the expulsion would be to make the Court a “school board for the country.”

In the months following, the publicity the case generated turned Jehovah’s Witnesses nationwide into targets.

Much More: How Corporations Hijacked the First Amendment to Evade Regulation | New Republic - BY TIM WU

Corporations have hijacked many things - including the 1st Amendment. Citizens United is another prime example of how courts protect corporations.

 

[TemplarKormac]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

 

[Sallow]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

 

[Sallow]

Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.

Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.

Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.

For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”

It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.

Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.

Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.

What people think of as the American free speech tradition, is, like civil rights and the Super Bowl, a tradition that turns out to date back only a half-century. As late as the 1950s, cities or states could ban motion pictures they found distasteful, arrest a man for calling the local sheriff a fascist, and lock up declared members of the Communist Party, all without violating the Constitution.

The shift toward free speech as we now understand it can be attributed in part to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1935, the school board in Minersville, Pennsylvania, instituted a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in its classrooms. Lillian and William Gobitas, children from a local Witness family, refused to participate, following church teaching that holds that seeking salvation from an “earthly emblem” is a sin. The Gobitas siblings were expelled. For good measure, a Catholic parish in the predominantly Catholic town announced a boycott of their parents’ store, wrecking its business. Yet when the Supreme Court took up the case, it voted eight to one against the family. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, wrote that to overturn the expulsion would be to make the Court a “school board for the country.”

In the months following, the publicity the case generated turned Jehovah’s Witnesses nationwide into targets.

Much More: How Corporations Hijacked the First Amendment to Evade Regulation | New Republic - BY TIM WU

Corporations have hijacked many things - including the 1st Amendment. Citizens United is another prime example of how courts protect corporations.

The wonderful thing about ObamaCare is that it sort of kiboshes this crap.

Instead of using expensive drugs as the Bush Pharma benefit did..it uses the best proven drugs at the cheapest prices.

One of the reasons it was and still is fought against.

 

[TemplarKormac]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

This thread is about the First Amendment, is it not? So I see no reason not to bring such an issue up. It is, of course, my First Amendment right.

Here you are defending a troll, who in his escapades, trolls dozens of conservative threads daily. Why won't you call him down for that? Oh right, selective outrage. Carry on.

 

[TemplarKormac]

Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.

Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.

Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.

For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”

It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.

Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.

Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.

What people think of as the American free speech tradition, is, like civil rights and the Super Bowl, a tradition that turns out to date back only a half-century. As late as the 1950s, cities or states could ban motion pictures they found distasteful, arrest a man for calling the local sheriff a fascist, and lock up declared members of the Communist Party, all without violating the Constitution.

The shift toward free speech as we now understand it can be attributed in part to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1935, the school board in Minersville, Pennsylvania, instituted a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in its classrooms. Lillian and William Gobitas, children from a local Witness family, refused to participate, following church teaching that holds that seeking salvation from an “earthly emblem” is a sin. The Gobitas siblings were expelled. For good measure, a Catholic parish in the predominantly Catholic town announced a boycott of their parents’ store, wrecking its business. Yet when the Supreme Court took up the case, it voted eight to one against the family. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, wrote that to overturn the expulsion would be to make the Court a “school board for the country.”

In the months following, the publicity the case generated turned Jehovah’s Witnesses nationwide into targets.

Much More: How Corporations Hijacked the First Amendment to Evade Regulation | New Republic - BY TIM WU

Corporations have hijacked many things - including the 1st Amendment. Citizens United is another prime example of how courts protect corporations.

The wonderful thing about ObamaCare is that it sort of kiboshes this crap.

Instead of using expensive drugs as the Bush Pharma benefit did..it uses the best proven drugs at the cheapest prices.

One of the reasons it was and still is fought against.

How do you know what Obamacare does? Did you bother to read all 2700 pages of it?

 

[Sallow]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

This thread is about the First Amendment, is it not? So I see no reason not to bring such an issue up. It is, of course, my First Amendment right.

Here you are defending a troll, who in his escapades, trolls dozens of conservative threads daily. Why won't you call him down for that? Oh right, selective outrage. Carry on.

You are obviously one of the people that see money as speech, corporations as people and don't see a problem with private interests writing legislation that effects a vast amount of people and benefits a few.

Personally? I have a problem with wealth driven legislation. I think it corrupts the political process is very meaningful ways.

 

[Sallow]

Much More: How Corporations Hijacked the First Amendment to Evade Regulation | New Republic - BY TIM WU

Corporations have hijacked many things - including the 1st Amendment. Citizens United is another prime example of how courts protect corporations.

The wonderful thing about ObamaCare is that it sort of kiboshes this crap.

Instead of using expensive drugs as the Bush Pharma benefit did..it uses the best proven drugs at the cheapest prices.

One of the reasons it was and still is fought against.

How do you know what Obamacare does? Did you bother to read all 2700 pages of it?

Medicare beneficiaries reach $5 billion in drug savings

Get out of the bubble.

 

[Stephanie]

trolls are worthless, how corporations hijacked the First Amendment

good grief

 

[martybegan]

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

This thread is about the First Amendment, is it not? So I see no reason not to bring such an issue up. It is, of course, my First Amendment right.

Here you are defending a troll, who in his escapades, trolls dozens of conservative threads daily. Why won't you call him down for that? Oh right, selective outrage. Carry on.

You are obviously one of the people that see money as speech, corporations as people and don't see a problem with private interests writing legislation that effects a vast amount of people and benefits a few.

Personally? I have a problem with wealth driven legislation. I think it corrupts the political process is very meaningful ways.

So when one becomes part of a corporation, especially as high level management, one suddenly gives up thier 1st amendment rights?

 

[Avatar4321]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

How is exercising free speech circumventing the Constitution?

The Constitution limits the powers of government, not individuals, groups, or businesses.

 

[Avatar4321]

You are obviously one of the people that see money as speech, corporations as people and don't see a problem with private interests writing legislation that effects a vast amount of people and benefits a few.

Money equalling speech has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Corporations are made of groups of people who have a right to free speech. You really need to actually read the Citizens United because when you make the Corporations as people argument you tell us you don't know what it actually says. Hint: It says absolutely nothing about corporations being people.

As for private interests writing legislationt hat effects a vast amount of people, you mean like Obamacare which offended our Democrat legislators to even consider reading before they passed?

Personally? I have a problem with wealth driven legislation. I think it corrupts the political process is very meaningful ways.

And yet you support George Soros's countless organizations who are literally writing the Democrat proposed legislation.

There is nothing bad about people spending money for causes they believe in. It corrupts nothing. What corruption the political process is the politicians being corrupt.

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

How is exercising free speech circumventing the Constitution?

The Constitution limits the powers of government, not individuals, groups, or businesses.

Exactly.. and that is why these statists have little use for the constitution... it inhibits their statist agenda... by design.

 

[Harry Dresden]

Corporations? How about Liberals? We don't go around arresting kids for saying the word "gun" on the school bus!

Be quiet, you liberal chimpanzee.

First off you are talking about separate issues.

Try bothering to address the point as opposed to the poster.

This thread isn't about kids on school buses yelling "gun".

This thread is about corporate entities using vast wealth to circumvent the Constitution.

well at least you know about the poster.....

 

[Harry Dresden]

Every time you fill a prescription at a drug store like Walgreens, the pharmacy keeps a record of the transaction, noting information such as your name, the drug, the dosage, and the issuing doctor. It’s a routine bit of bookkeeping, and for a long time it raised few eyebrows. Then a firm called IMS Health starting buying up the data. Mining pharmacy records, the company assembled profiles of hundreds of thousands of American doctors and millions of individual patients, with names and other identifying details encrypted. IMS Health turned around and sold access to those files to pharmaceutical companies, making it easier for the firms to target (and reward) the physicians most likely to prescribe expensive, brand-name drugs.

Eventually, doctors and state officials caught on to what IMS Health was doing. Where the company saw a business opportunity, they saw a strategy that violated patient privacy and could increase health care costs. Three states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont—decided in 2006 and 2007 to ban pharmacies from selling prescription records for commercial purposes. By late 2010, 26 other states were considering similar measures.

Had the issue remained subject to a normal democratic process, it would have continued to play out that way—through a gradual, state-by-state debate about whether so-called “prescription confidentiality” laws make for good policy. But IMS Health did not want that kind of fight. Instead, it filed separate suits against the three states that had first cracked down on its business, invoking the First Amendment. The selling of prescription records, the company asserted, is a form of free speech.

For most of U.S. history, such a claim would have been a dead letter in court. But when it comes to the First Amendment, we live in interesting times. In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the new data-protection laws, arguing that they discriminated against IMS Health. “The State,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, “has burdened a form of protected expression. ... This the State cannot do.”

It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.

Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.

Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation.

What people think of as the American free speech tradition, is, like civil rights and the Super Bowl, a tradition that turns out to date back only a half-century. As late as the 1950s, cities or states could ban motion pictures they found distasteful, arrest a man for calling the local sheriff a fascist, and lock up declared members of the Communist Party, all without violating the Constitution.

The shift toward free speech as we now understand it can be attributed in part to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1935, the school board in Minersville, Pennsylvania, instituted a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in its classrooms. Lillian and William Gobitas, children from a local Witness family, refused to participate, following church teaching that holds that seeking salvation from an “earthly emblem” is a sin. The Gobitas siblings were expelled. For good measure, a Catholic parish in the predominantly Catholic town announced a boycott of their parents’ store, wrecking its business. Yet when the Supreme Court took up the case, it voted eight to one against the family. Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal Franklin Roosevelt appointee, wrote that to overturn the expulsion would be to make the Court a “school board for the country.”

In the months following, the publicity the case generated turned Jehovah’s Witnesses nationwide into targets.

Much More: How Corporations Hijacked the First Amendment to Evade Regulation | New Republic - BY TIM WU

Corporations have hijacked many things - including the 1st Amendment. Citizens United is another prime example of how courts protect corporations.

The wonderful thing about ObamaCare is that it sort of kiboshes this crap.

Instead of using expensive drugs as the Bush Pharma benefit did..it uses the best proven drugs at the cheapest prices.

One of the reasons it was and still is fought against.

Blue Shield out here has been doing that long before Obama Care....

 

[Staidhup]

One must not forget that the left in America is anti business, the New Republic is just another progressive rag with a stated agenda and bent to substantiate their position and agenda.

 

[Lakhota]

One must not forget that the left in America is anti business, the New Republic is just another progressive rag with a stated agenda and bent to substantiate their position and agenda.

No, the left in America is not anti-business - just anti-unregulated business.

 

[The2ndAmendment]

Because this really matters right now with the widespread tyranny of the federal government...

 

[Lakhota]

Because this really matters right now with the widespread tyranny of the federal government...

What tyranny?

 

[The2ndAmendment]

Because this really matters right now with the widespread tyranny of the federal government...

What tyranny?

Just ask the Furher

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veztNJQyRJg]Schindler's List (5/9) Movie CLIP - A Small Pile of Hinges (1993) HD - YouTube[/ame]