The Constitutional amendment America needs.

There has been a growing fury about the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, but much of that fury hangs upon an odd reading of the Court’s opinion. The Court, it is said, has given corporations all the rights of “persons.” It has elevated these artificial beings into entities “endowed by their Creator” (us) “with certain unalienable rights,” including the right to free speech.

No doubt the Court has a long history of recognizing the “person” in “Inc.” But this current wave of criticism is hard to understand, because the Court’s entire Citizens United opinion hung upon the fact that the First Amendment says nothing about who or what is to get the benefit of its protection. It simply bans certain kinds of regulation. As Justice Scalia put it in his concurrence: “The Amendment is written in terms of ‘speech,’ not speakers.” Thus, the government is blocked by the First Amendment from constraining the free speech of any entity, whether that entity is a corporation or a dolphin.

This interpretation of the First Amendment is going to create real trouble for the Court when Congress gets around to closing the gap that the Court’s opinion seems to create. If it is the regulation, and not the speaker that matters, then the Chinese are no different from the Chamber of Commerce. So how can the Court honestly uphold the inevitable law limiting the Chinese from campaigning, when they’ve just told us that identity doesn’t matter?

One need not be xenophobic to be troubled by the idea of foreign influence in American elections. Certainly the Framers were. The point is not that foreigners are evil. It is rather that elections are private. It is we—citizens—who are to select who is to govern us. And it is completely appropriate for us to protect the debate we have about that selection by limiting disproportionate spending by non-citizens.

This insight gives a clue to perhaps the most sensible constitutional response to the Supreme Court’s decision. Not, as an angry gaggle of activists have proposed, through an amendment aimed at denying what Citizens United never asserted—that corporations are persons. But instead, through an amendment that recognizes what no one has ever asserted—that whether or not they are persons, corporations are not United States citizens. And if there is something appropriate to keeping the conversation about who is to govern us to us citizens, there may well be something appropriate in protecting elections against undue influence by non-citizens.