Your senator may soon be interviewing the President’s nominee for the Supreme Court. While sworn to answer truthfully, the nominee should be asked a simple question—

A fourth-grader could answer correctly and truthfully. No, it’s not.

But the nominee, under oath, will undoubtedly evade a straightforward answer.

Why? Because it is the Supreme Court’s settled doctrine that A CORPORATION IS A PERSON.

And the Supreme Court asserts that doctrine to be a constitutional imperative —the Constitution says it! That means it may be used —as it has been used and will be used— to overrule attempts by Congress to regulate corporations.

The nominee will in all likelihood conjure some abstruse and convoluted reasoning that must ultimately rest on this distinction: a corporation might not be a person in common language but it is in legal language.

That does not at all resolve the issue of its constitutionality. Does the Constitution belong to the people or the lawyers? Did We the People intend to include corporations in our Bill of Rights?

A character in the book Your Ignorance Is Our Strength recognizes the true meaning of Lord Acton’s famous dictum, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." It applies to institutions as much as to individuals.

He insists that the reasoning behind the personhood of corporations is not rocket science. It is simply an Orwellian deception —a redefinition of vocabulary by the Supreme Court in order to aggrandize its own power. And to use that power to overrule the democratic branches of the government.

And to give political power to corporations, at the expense of the rights of the people.

But of course the defenders of the Supreme Court’s doctrine have other, subtly specious, arguments. Other characters in Your Ignorance Is Our Strength give voice to them, while yet others question them and refute their fallacies.

And if your senator can be convinced to ask that simple question, he or she should be prepared to respond to the facile answer that will be offered.

But every citizen who believes democracy is worth preserving should be aware of this pernicious Supreme Court doctrine. The dialogs in Your Ignorance Is Our Strength elucidate its origin and its logical, practical, and legal justifications.