Just Like You, Donald Trump, They Tried To Keep Us Off The Ballot
A "Guest Column" from Murray Hill, Inc.
When the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations had the same free speech rights as individuals, I became Campaign Manager for the first corporation to run for Congress, Murray Hill Inc.
Designated Human Eric Hensal and I started a national conversation about campaign finance that was removed from the ivory tower of court decisions and regulation, and set in the familiar frame of a political campaign. I wrote about this recently here, and you can also see our campaign video, and me looking shifty on CNBC.
But to add context to Donald Trump’s case before the Supreme Court….here’s Murray!
Donald Trump, we know how you feel as you face the Supreme Court.
Before they tried to disqualify you from the ballot, they came after us.
We’re Murray Hill—not the Manhattan neighborhood you don’t own anything in, but the first corporation to run for Congress. Our campaign was derailed by the same biased, narrow-minded institutions arrayed against you today.
Like you, we were fighting to protect an essential freedom under fierce attack. Your Supreme Court case was foreshadowed by our battles with the Maryland State Board of Elections during the 2010 election cycle.
We were fighting for corporate civil rights, just as you are fighting for unlimited presidential power and unchecked immunity.
When the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations enjoy the same free speech rights as individuals, our corporation saw an opening to take democracy’s next step. If corporations are to have the rights the founding fathers meant for us, we asked, why shouldn’t corporations be allowed to vote? Why shouldn’t we be able to run for office?
We launched a real campaign for Congress to take the issue of campaign finance out of the ivory tower of court decisions and policy recommendations, and into the familiar frame of a political campaign. A front-page story in the Washington Post called us,
“…the perfect candidate for this political moment: young, bold, media-savvy, a Washington outsider eager to reshape the way things are done in the nation's capital. And if these are cynical times, well, then, it's safe to say Murray Hill is by far the most cynical.”
Mr. Trump, you make Murray Hill look like Mary Poppins.
We sought to deliver on the aspiration to have “the best Congress money can buy,” replacing an inefficient Congress of elected humans with direct corporate representation and unfettered corporate hegemony. But you’re taking the “hedge” out of hegemony and bulldozing through centuries of superstitions about inalienable rights.
We only tangled with a County and State Board of Elections—you’re at the Supreme Court. But the principles are the same, and our experience is instructive.
When we filled out an application to register as a voter in Montgomery County, Maryland, we thought we were doing the daily work of democracy, as now enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court. Little did we know that this routine form would cause shockwaves throughout local and state government.
We received a letter from the Counsel to the Montgomery County Board of Elections informing us that the voter registration application we’d completed had been forwarded to the State, and that the County had been informed not to process the application.
The attorney spent billable hours on correspondence with state officials, and enclosed an email from the Director of the Voter Registration Division that said we “did not meet the qualifications to register,” because we were “not a human being.”
Of course, we appealed this ruling and put more lawyers to work in Annapolis, and eventually they handed down a 438-word opinion, repeating the calumny that we were “not human” and questioning whether we met the age requirement, alleging that we were only five years old.
They wouldn’t let us argue our case that corporations, unlike bodied humans, do not follow an aging process in which they are born, go through childhood, adolescence, and then are old enough to buy beer. A corporation is a fully formed person from the moment its charter is filed with a Secretary of State.
These and other essential questions regarding the nature of corporate personhood were thwarted and blocked at every turn. To his credit, our opponent, Rep. Van Hollen agreed to our debate challenge, telling an audience that “Murray Hill wants to put a logo on your candidate.”
So? Mr. Trump, we believe you call that branding—and isn’t that what counts these days? We are both fighting for a new definition of “democracy,” replacing old-fashioned views of politics as an engine for meaningful change with celebrity, wealth and grievance.
Your dream for a new day of dictatorship is threatened by the same constitutional literalists who quashed ours over a decade ago. While we focused on different aspects of our government, our vision is essentially shared. Bodied people making decisions about running the United States on the basis of who gets more pieces of paper shoved into ballot boxes is antiquated and weak.
This new definition of who can be considered a legal voter may take some getting used to. But it’s not the first time the voting franchise expanded. The first colonists allowed only landowners, or franchise holders, to participate fully in society. They followed the sentiment expressed by the English lawyer William Blackstone that the rest of the people “are in so mean a situation as to be esteemed to have no will of their own.”
Have things gotten much better since Blackstone? How is this representative democracy thing really working out?
Over to you, U.S. Supreme Court.