It seems that at least one Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, is willing to stand up for constitutional rights. Not for my rights or your rights, of course. That would just be tacky.

     Instead, Senator Specter has filed a bill to protect the constitutional rights of large corporations that are being investigated for white-collar crime. Don’t you love it when a U.S. Senator is willing to take a bold and courageous stand to help protect his major campaign contributors against federal investigators?

     According to an article published in the Anchorage Daily News on December 8, Specter has filed a bill to prevent prosecutors from using certain tactics when they are investigating corporations suspected of committing white-collar crime. Never you mind that some of these are the same types of tactics which prosecutors use when investigating individuals. Under Specter’s view of things, corporations should have legal protections that are not available to individuals like you or me.

     Senator Specter is not the only person to hold that kind of “corporations first” attitude. But it wasn’t always like this. One hundred fifty years ago, corporations were chartered for only specific and limited purposes, and had no constitutional rights. There was a long line of cases where corporations had argued that they had constitutional rights, and where the courts said, in effect, “oh no you don’t.”

     Then in 1886, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The court itself, in its written decision, did NOT hold that corporations have the right to equal protection under the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The court’s clerk who wrote up a statement of facts for the decision, however, said that the Chief Justice had said that the court was of the opinion that corporations did have that right.

     Technically, that claim by the clerk had no legal value as precedent. It was not what the court actually said in its decision. But after that decision was published, courts everywhere in the country began granting constitutional rights to corporations. The result today is that corporations enjoy most of the constitutional rights that you and I enjoy, and also have rights that you and I are denied.

     Now, Senator Specter wants to pass even more laws to protect the rights of corporations against government actions that are routinely used against individuals. He wants you to ignore the fact that the Constitutional rights of individuals have been thoroughly trashed by the Republican controlled legislative and executive branches during the last six years. You should not trouble your pretty little head over such trifles as Enron and Halliburton and Bechtel and Arthur Anderson and Health South, and Qwest and Hewlett Packard and dozens of other corporate scandals. Those are mere aberrations. No, the important thing is to make sure that corporations are not subjected to rigorous investigations and prosecutions when they break the law.

     Of course, Senator Specter’s proposed bill has nothing to do with the fact that a very large percentage of his campaign contributions come from large corporations. This is strictly a matter of principle. The economic interests of his campaign and his campaign contributors do not factor into this in any way.

     What if this results in an increase in white-collar crime and corporate scandals, and cripples the ability of federal prosecutors to crack down on corporate malfeasance? Well, as Senator Specter was quoted as saying in the ADN article “That’s a small price to pay for preserving constitutional rights.”

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