But that same sentence in Section 1 uses a second word a few lines later: person.
Don Lichterman – Jul 03, 2026 – Read The Full Substack here!
There is a reason this Substack carries the name it does. Everybody remembers the moment. A candidate for president stands on a stage in Iowa, gets heckled about corporate taxes, and blurts out four words that were supposed to sound like common sense and instead sounded like a confession: ‘corporations are people, my friend’. The crowd laughed. The clip went viral. And more than a decade later, cable news pundits, senators, and half the people arguing about the economy on your timeline still cannot explain what that sentence actually means, why it is true in a courtroom and false in every other room in America, or how it got that way in the first place. I literally watched two top media people this week try to even say the sentence, corporations are something they fumble on the words and can barely describe. Overall, my issue is not with the diabolical way it became this way; it is how selective it is with regard to corporate personhood and corporate bylaws.
I want to fix that. Not because Mitt Romney deserves a defense, he does not need one from me, ut because the confusion around that phrase is not an accident. It is not a gaffe. It is the entire point. Somewhere between the word “person” and the word “individual” or in this case, people,’ sits one of the most successful legal magic tricks in the history of this country, and this Fourth of July, as we mark 250 years since we declared ourselves free from a king who ruled by decree, I think it is worth asking who is actually running the show now, and under what authority.
The Sentence That Was Supposed to Free People, Not Corporations. Let’s start where this all starts: the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, in the wreckage of the Civil War. This was not a routine piece of legislative housekeeping.
It was written to bury the Dred Scott decision, the one that told Black Americans they had no rights a white man was bound to respect. It was written to make sure that when the war ended, the country could not simply go back to pretending an entire class of human beings did not fully exist under the law.
The framers reached for the broadest word they had. Not citizen. Person. No state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws. Read The Full Substack here!
Person was chosen deliberately, and for a good reason. They needed language broad enough to protect immigrants, freedmen, and anyone standing on American soil who might otherwise get run over by a hostile state legislature. It was supposed to be a shield.
A floor beneath which no state could push a human being, regardless of what that state’s own laws said about who counted.
Nobody in that room in 1866 was thinking about railroads. And that is exactly why what happened next is so galling.
The Lawyer Who Lied to the Supreme Court. Here is where the story turns from constitutional history into something closer to a con job, and I do not use that word loosely. Read The Full Substack here!
