It sounds good. But there’s a problem: If the protections of the First Amendment didn’t apply to corporations, the CEOs of the dissenting companies above would be opening their companies to legal, open retaliation by the government—cancellation of contracts, exclusion from government programs, and other measures a spiteful administration could take to punish them. The First Amendment prevents this sort of retaliation against the leaders as persons—but it would offer no shelter to their corporations, which Trump could punish at whim; the corporation itself wouldn’t even be entitled to Fifth Amendment due process. No CEO faithful to his or her charge would dare open their corporation to such danger.

And if the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” didn’t apply to corporations, DreamHost would have been forced to hand over the required information by now. No court could even hear the company’s challenge.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney (how I miss him!) said—to general ridicule—“corporations are people, my friend.” What he meant by that, I believe, was not that Walmart or Unilever is an Iron Giant-style behemoth that can stride around the landscape, but that corporations are made up of people. My corporations class professor, James Cox, used to say that corporations are “the modern equivalent of the ancient city-state.” The “people” of these odd societies include not just corporate management or shareholders, but also corporate employees and their families, corporate customers, and people in the communities that create and protect the companies. Large companies need to hire talented workers; they need a diverse workforce to understand and operate in the national and world market; they need to project values that make their customers feel affirmed. Consumer companies—food and beverage companies like Coca-Cola or retail giants like Walmart—cannot afford to drive away whole blocs of customers, incur consumer boycotts, or inspire shareholder revolts.

The campaign finance problem, in fact, has little to do with corporations, and everything to do with the increasing share of America’s wealth held by a few greedy individuals. It is wealthy individuals, far more than giant corporations, who are poisoning our politics. Stripping corporations of rights would do nothing to reduce the power of the Koch brothers, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, or hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer.

As for corporations, Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College, recently wrote that “corporations may provide a brake on the political pendulum’s rightward swing … To survive, corporations must be inclusive and multicultural in ways that homogeneous, economically distressed, insular tribes are not.”

Greenfield argues—in published essays and a forthcoming book—that what we need are corporations that are more fully human, not more “artificial.” He points out that, without any change to the Constitution, states today could amend their corporate laws to require corporations to take account of all their constituencies, and even represent workers and the public on their boards. Such reforms might ensure that corporations would be even more aware of their obligations to serve the interests of the larger society—to practice better corporate citizenship. In 2017, it is remarkable how many of our hopes may depend on that.