What they did find was that (real, human) people have certain rights that they are able to exercise by organizing into corporations.
What they did find was that (real, human) people have certain rights that they are able to exercise by organizing into corporations.
That 1 USC §1 is not a typo: this copy appears in the first section of the first title of US code, on disambiguating common terms used in law.
> The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/
SCOTUS held that coorporations (and more broadly "associations of people") have the same rights to free speech that any individual does.
The point you and others try to make is that corporations are people as a result of CU and so other human rights apply to them. This is backwards. SCOTUS and lower courts basically established that free speech applies to corporations same as individuals. But it did not establish their personhood. This is exactly equivalent to saying that a corporation has to pay taxes like a person. It does not make it a person.
So what people get wrong is they say “if a corporation is a person then it gets to do X”. Thats incorrect, nobody except talking heads on TV called it a person. Similarly “if a corporation has the right to free speech it has the right to do X” is incorrect. Having one right does not confer all rights. Again think of it as the idea of corporations get to pay taxes. People get to pay taxes. This did not make corporations people and did not confer any other rights onto corporations.