A 14th Amendment History Lesson

Part of the reason that banks got so big in the first place are the legal rights granted them by the federal government; rights that you might think were only granted to people, like free speech. There was a lot of attention paid to the idea of corporate personhood after the Citizen’s United case in the Supreme Court in 2010, but the idea that corporations are people goes further back than that. In fact it goes all the way back to the constitutional amendment that granted rights to former slaves, the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. We get a history lesson from Mike Schlitt, a regular commentator on “Press Play,” amateur historian and political junkie.