82R7155 BPG-D
By: Martinez Fischer H.C.R. No. 91
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
WHEREAS, Free and fair elections are essential to democracy
and effective self-governance, but the United States Supreme Court,
in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, decided that the
American people are powerless to limit corporate expenditures aimed
at influencing state and federal elections; and
WHEREAS, The 5-4 decision allowed unlimited corporate
spending in elections as a form of "free speech" for the corporate
"person," but unlike human beings, who actually vote in elections,
a corporation is a government-created structure for doing business
that may only be used for purposes defined by the state or federal
statute that permitted its creation; further undermining the idea
of corporate personhood is the fact that corporations can exist
simultaneously in many nations and the fact that they can exist in
perpetuity; and
WHEREAS, Corporations are not mentioned in the United States
Constitution as originally adopted, nor have Congress and the
states recognized corporations as legal persons in any subsequent
federal constitutional amendment; in addition, the radical
decision in Citizens United casts aside more than a century of
precedent prohibiting corporate contributions to federal election
campaigns, dating back to the Tillman Act of 1907; and
WHEREAS, Before the supreme court ruling, corporations
already used their power to successfully seek the judicial reversal
of democratically enacted laws that aimed to curb corporate abuse,
but Citizens United has unleashed billions of dollars of corporate
money into the election process, making it highly unlikely such
laws will now even be proposed; as candidates for public office
compete for corporate funds, their attention is diverted from the
interests and needs of their human constituents to the interests of
large corporations, and the two are often in direct conflict; and
WHEREAS, The Citizens United decision distorts the meaning of
the First Amendment and dramatically dilutes the vote and voice of
every individual American who does not control a large corporate
treasury; in order to prevent irreparable damage to our democracy
by a deluge of corporate dollars, it is necessary to amend the
United States Constitution to affirm that only human beings are
persons and that corporations are not part of "We the People" by
whom and for whom our constitution was established; now, therefore,
be it
RESOLVED, That the 82nd Legislature of the State of Texas
hereby respectfully urge the Congress of the United States to
propose and submit to the states for ratification an amendment to
the United States Constitution that defines persons as human beings
only and that provides that corporations are not persons under the
laws of the United States or any of its jurisdictional
subdivisions; and, be it further
RESOLVED, That the Texas secretary of state forward official
copies of this resolution to the president of the United States, to
the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House of
Representatives of the United States Congress, and to all the
members of the Texas delegation to Congress with the request that
this resolution be entered in the Congressional Record as a
memorial to the Congress of the United States of America.