I've never understood the logic of silencing companies (banning political donations, participation, etc). Companies are groups of people. People are free to speak (legally enshrined in many locales). Restricting how a company speaks seems to be restricting the decisions of a group of people to speak, and thus an individual's right to speak.
With regards to the statement about being a "tax paying entity" or not to have a voice, that is an extremely dangerous road to go down. See "poll taxes".
Companies aren't just groups of people. They're groups of people that are specially organized and granted limited liability and other privileges. I don't mean to claim that companies should or shouldn't have political voice, but let's not pretend that there's something sacrosanct about incorporation.
> With regards to the statement about being a "tax paying entity" or not to have a voice, that is an extremely dangerous road to go down. See "poll taxes".
Not at all. Every person has the potential to pay taxes, whether they do or not. We have wisely decided that people who make below some vague amount don't have to pay taxes. But they'd be eligible to pay if they made more money. As opposed to a theoretically non tax paying corporation.
As for corporations "speaking", the people controlling the corporation are using the productivity of their workers to speak for those workers (if money is speech, that money came from the employees' productivity), whether their employees want the to or not. They're unjustly gaining extra speech, beyond their individual speech, which everyone already has a right to.
EDIT: taxes and speech, I probably wasn't clear. Any person can vote, whether they pay taxes or not. They have skin in the game, because they're people. Their population determines congressional districts at every census, and corporations do not. I'm not saying you can't vote until you make enough to pay.
Considering that in corporations only a few people have a real say giving corporations political speech gives those few disproportional representation. They still can speak as much as they want but as individuals.
With regards to the statement about being a "tax paying entity" or not to have a voice, that is an extremely dangerous road to go down. See "poll taxes".