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The very scary undertone behind the Hobby Lobby verdict. (well, scary to CEOs...)
http://thebillfold.com/2014/06/hobby-lobby-ruling-isnt-just-anti-woman-its-anti-employee/In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court is not directly applying constitutional principles. Rather, it’s applying the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law Congress passed in 1993 in response to an earlier Supreme Court decision, which creates broader protections for religious freedom than the court had found under the Constitution. But the key question – as it likely would be if the case were simply applying the First Amendment and not the RFRA – was whether a corporation was a “person” capable of having or exercising religious freedom. Today, the Court said yes.
Why is this a big deal? Well, you have to understand what corporations are. In short, they are fictitious legal “people” who own business assets. They exist because the government passes laws creating them, and their purpose is to insulate their owners from crushing financial risk, and create a transparent structure so that many people can contribute smaller amounts of money to a business. The idea is that if a person who wanted to operate a business ran the risk of having her house foreclosed on to satisfy the business’s debts, she would be discouraged from starting the business in the first place. Likewise, if businesses could only be as big as the small amount of money that any one person felt comfortable risking, businesses would never get very big at all. So, traditionally, a corporation is a “person” in the eyes of the law for debt, profit, and liability purposes. A corporation has official documents that define its purpose (usually, some variation on “to maximize profit for shareholders”), and when a corporate officer mixes her own money with corporate money, uses corporate money indiscriminately for purposes that don’t advance the corporation’s defined interests, or otherwise blurs the line between business money and personal money, she can be sued personally (this is called, poetically, “piercing the corporate veil“).
What Hobby Lobby does is expand the corporate veil, a process that started with the 2010 Citizens United decision. Citizens United said that corporations, as people, had free speech rights, and since political contributions were a form of speech, limits on corporate political contributions infringed on free speech. The Supreme Court, in Hobby Lobby, takes the next logical step:
Why is this a big deal? Well, you have to understand what corporations are. In short, they are fictitious legal “people” who own business assets. They exist because the government passes laws creating them, and their purpose is to insulate their owners from crushing financial risk, and create a transparent structure so that many people can contribute smaller amounts of money to a business. The idea is that if a person who wanted to operate a business ran the risk of having her house foreclosed on to satisfy the business’s debts, she would be discouraged from starting the business in the first place. Likewise, if businesses could only be as big as the small amount of money that any one person felt comfortable risking, businesses would never get very big at all. So, traditionally, a corporation is a “person” in the eyes of the law for debt, profit, and liability purposes. A corporation has official documents that define its purpose (usually, some variation on “to maximize profit for shareholders”), and when a corporate officer mixes her own money with corporate money, uses corporate money indiscriminately for purposes that don’t advance the corporation’s defined interests, or otherwise blurs the line between business money and personal money, she can be sued personally (this is called, poetically, “piercing the corporate veil“).
What Hobby Lobby does is expand the corporate veil, a process that started with the 2010 Citizens United decision. Citizens United said that corporations, as people, had free speech rights, and since political contributions were a form of speech, limits on corporate political contributions infringed on free speech. The Supreme Court, in Hobby Lobby, takes the next logical step:
Sooo...in my humble and uneducated opinion, if the SCOTUS now says that a stakeholder's personal beliefs extend to the corporation, then any damage caused by the corporation (or its products) should now be able to seek compensation from the stakeholder PERSONALLY!
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/25/4_things_you_need_to_know_about_the_hobby_lobby_scotus_case/
3. The business community isn’t rooting for Hobby Lobby to win this one.
If the Supreme Court sides with Hobby Lobby and agrees that corporations are people with religious convictions, the ruling would basically destroy what’s known as the corporate veil (which means to treat a corporation as a distinct entity from its owners or shareholders) — a precedent that would have far-ranging consequences.
Which may explain why corporate America has been unusually quiet about the case. As David H. Gans recently noted at Slate, “Not one Fortune 500 company filed a brief in the case. Apart from a few isolated briefs from companies just like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the U.S. business community offered no support for the claim that secular, for-profit corporations are persons that can exercise religion.”
The Chamber of Commerce and other groups — which were falling over themselves to file amicus briefs in support of Citizens United — likely recognize that a ruling for the corporate right to the free exercise of religion would cause complete chaos, both in terms of corporate governance and market stability. By treating corporations as the same thing as their owners, a ruling in support of Hobby Lobby wouldn’t just pierce the corporate veil, it would effectively shred it and light it on fire.
If the Supreme Court sides with Hobby Lobby and agrees that corporations are people with religious convictions, the ruling would basically destroy what’s known as the corporate veil (which means to treat a corporation as a distinct entity from its owners or shareholders) — a precedent that would have far-ranging consequences.
Which may explain why corporate America has been unusually quiet about the case. As David H. Gans recently noted at Slate, “Not one Fortune 500 company filed a brief in the case. Apart from a few isolated briefs from companies just like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the U.S. business community offered no support for the claim that secular, for-profit corporations are persons that can exercise religion.”
The Chamber of Commerce and other groups — which were falling over themselves to file amicus briefs in support of Citizens United — likely recognize that a ruling for the corporate right to the free exercise of religion would cause complete chaos, both in terms of corporate governance and market stability. By treating corporations as the same thing as their owners, a ruling in support of Hobby Lobby wouldn’t just pierce the corporate veil, it would effectively shred it and light it on fire.
Did SCOTUS, essentially, just backstab their most precious idol of all (capitalism) without realizing it?
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