It isn't a joke. It's a very serious legal precedent that, if pushed hard enough, can go all the way to Supreme Court (which would most likely reject the case, letting the last decision stand). It is an excellent example of a serious issue with case-based law, as practiced within the U.S. It's a hack, and it's designed to demonstrate both the absurdity of the Supreme Court's decision when taken to a logical extreme, and the limitations of our legal system. It's also very clever. The fact that it is satirical in nature is only of cursory interest.
There are lots of serious implications stemming from the Court's recent decision and one doesn't have to look far to find a serious discussion of them, no matter how one views the merits of the issue. See, for example, this piece on how the "High Court Campaign Finance Opinion Roils Dozens of Cases" (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202441779559&High...).
Since the law has recognized corporations as "legal persons" for a couple of centuries at least, all without anyone even beginning to think that a corporation is a citizen entitled to vote and to run for office, I think there is a long-standing rationale for this position that its critics need to address before simply declaring the point to be absurd. This sort of stunt obviously fails to do this. And, far from demonstrating the absurdity of the Supreme Court's position taken to a logical extreme (to paraphrase your characterization), it does no more than take a straw man position out to a logical extreme and therefore illustrates nothing (at least nothing serious as far as law is concerned). It is, therefore, a low form of argumentation.
I understand that people feel passionately about it, and therefore appreciate a clever ploy that appears to make their point, but that is really my point: it is that very animated spirit that we can have about politics that allows us to lower standards and find acceptable in that context a way of arguing that we would axiomatically reject in another context.
far from demonstrating the absurdity of the Supreme Court's position taken to a logical extreme (to paraphrase your characterization), it does no more than take a straw man position out to a logical extreme and therefore illustrates nothing
This is a much better explanation of the view point you expressed originally - probably the best I've seen so far. I agree with you here completely. I still think it's a clever hack, but I concede that my original argument wasn't very strong.
The court's decision, as I understand it, was that people do not lose their right to free speech merely because they exercise it while involved in a corporation. So, the logical extreme is that people should not lose their right to run for office even if involved in a corporation, right?
People seem to want to spin this as "people involved in corporations gain a 'free speech' right that they wouldn't have if they were just a rich person", which would seem pretty bizarre, if it were actually what was said.
