Sotomayor and the Myth of "Corporate Personhood"

Last week, reports emerged from the SC(R)OTUS, claiming that newly appointed Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor had publically opened the issue of the legitimacy of the landmark headnote on the "S-P vs. Santa Clara" decision, which in 1889 bestowed legal "personhood" on corpoRat America, and opened the floodgates for the corporatization of the nation, with the subsequent (and consequent) diminishment of real "natural" human, civil and political rights. The Santa Clara decision, along with "Buckley v. Vallejo" a century later, is the cornerstone and lynch-pin of the metastatic corpoRatization of the country.

I am glad she brought it up. It is, possibly, even a positive step, though--unlike Susie, over at Suburban Guerrilla (where I first read the report of Sotomayor's apostasy)--I am not ready yet to suspend my unease over Justice Sonia's sympathies for the corpoRats she served so assiduously before joining the Bench. While it is heartening that the issue should be getting public exposure (such as it is: a couple of bloggers, another being Digby, yesterday, being pretty much the extent of the SCUM's acknowledgment of the breech), I am also a bit nervous about it.

Why, you ask?

Because I fear that by tipping her hand before she has any reliable support on the issue with her colleagues on the Court, and whilst the RATS still control the majority (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, along with the ever-reliable, Ed Meese-kateer, Kennedy), all this forthrightness will accomplish will be to put up another GOPuke road-block in the path of any future Obama nominee--particularly if (crocodile tears?) something fatal should befall one of the Puke/K-RATS majority, or even in the event of the retirement of Stevens or Ginsberg. Sotomayor's opening the discussion of the issue will necessitate that NO subsequent Obama nominee be on any record of any kind, anywhere, ever, of agreeing with her on this or any other issue.

So that, in addition to GOPuke "litmus tests" on abortion, 'empathy,' etc., henceforth, any future nominee's attitudes toward the "Headnote" amendment will become a stalking-point for rightard, Senatorial opponents of democratic, personal civil rights.

And so, in a sort of perverse sense, Sotomayor's revelation of her openness to a SCROTUS discussion of the issue of corpoRat "personhood' will have the consequence, for the foreseeable future, of their not being nominated, much less appointed any Justices who would agree with her on revisiting, much less overturning, the SP.-v-SCC headnote...