In my view, a corporation is not a person. A corporation does not have First Amendment rights to spend as much... — Bernie Sanders

In my view, a corporation is not a person. A corporation does not have First Amendment rights to spend as much money as it wants, without disclosure, on a political campaign.

Author: Bernie Sanders

Insight: When we talk about money in politics, we're really talking about power and whose voice gets heard. Sanders is pushing back against something that feels counterintuitive to a lot of people: the idea that a business entity—something created by law, with no heartbeat or conscience—should have the same rights to influence elections as you do. It's worth sitting with that for a second, because it touches something we all sense: that a person voting and a corporation spending millions feel fundamentally different, even if both are technically "speech." The surprising part is that this isn't just abstract. When corporations can dump unlimited cash into campaigns without saying where it came from, it creates a kind of political ventriloquism. You see an ad that looks independent but might be funded by interests directly opposed to your own wellbeing, and there's no way to trace it back. Compare that to how we treat individual donations—there's usually a requirement to disclose who's funding what. The asymmetry bothers people across the political spectrum once they notice it. The real tension here is practical: How do we let people organize their economic interests through companies while also preventing those same structures from drowning out regular citizens in the democratic conversation? It's not anti-business to ask that question. It's just asking whether democracy means everyone's vote counts roughly equally, or whether it means everyone's checkbook counts.