Who Are ‘We the People’?

[rug]

By ERIC L. LEWISOCT. 4, 2014

WHO is a person? How do you qualify for basic human rights? What is required for you to be able to speak or worship freely or to be free from torture?

Throughout American history, the Supreme Court has considered and reconsidered the criteria for membership in the club of rights, oscillating between a vision limiting rights to preferred groups and another granting rights to all who require protection. These competing visions have led to some strange results.

Corporations (as well as unions) can spend on political speech to further their group interests as though they were individual political actors. Corporations can assert religious rights to gain legal exemptions from laws that would otherwise apply to them. Muslim detainees at Guantánamo Bay, however, have none of these rights.

As a corporate litigator who has also spent more than a decade defending Guantánamo detainees, I have been trying to figure out why corporations are worthy of court protection and Muslims held in indefinite detention without trial by the United States at a naval base in Cuba are not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/opinion/sunday/who-are-we-the-people.html?_r=0

[AtheistCrusader]

1. This is one of these 'pick a topic folder on the left, any topic at all, and we are allies' thing.

We desperately need to close Guantanamo bay. Possession of the land is theft, what we are doing there, and why we are doing it can only be described as human rights abuses.

How are we still struggling with this, I don't understand.

[AlbertCat]

2. Corporations (as well as unions) can spend on political speech to further their group interests

Which is all about oligarchy and has nothing to do with democracy. (it didn't even have to do with the case involved, remember?) It's bogus and needs to go as soon as we get a Court that is not full of senile and unqualified conservatives.

[freebrew]

3. The * administration...

manipulated the laws by claiming that since the POWs were really 'enemy combatants' and not even US citizens, they had no rights under our constitution. I don't know if there was any court hearing to decide that or if anyone in government objected, but I think that is still how these people are being viewed. Sad.

[Jim__]

4. Aliens held outside the US are not persons. Does this apply to resident aliens?

Can a resident alien be shipped to Guantanamo and become a non-person? Has it been established that citizens outside the United States are, indeed, persons under US law?