Conservative Pennsylvanians Pass ‘Radical' Laws Defying U.S. Constitution

Nearly 220 years after America's Constitution was drafted in Pennsylvania, scores of rural Keystone State communities are declaring the document null and void.

More than 100 largely Republican municipalities have passed laws to abolish the constitutional rights of corporations, inventing what some critics are calling a "radical" new kind of environmental activism. Led by the nonprofit Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, they are attempting to jumpstart a national movement, with Celdf chapters in at least 23 states actively promoting an agenda of "disobedient lawmaking."

"I understand that state law and federal law is supposed to pre-empt local laws, but federal law tells us we're supposed to have clean air and clean water," the mayor of Tamaqua, Pa., Christian Morrison, told The New York Sun.

More than a year ago, the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Corporation stirred an uproar in Mr. Morrison's eastern Schuylkill County borough with a proposal to use a large strip mine as a disposal site for material dredged up from the Hudson and Delaware rivers.

But in May, the mayor, 37, cast a tie-breaking council vote to enact an ordinance that bans corporate waste dumping — making his the first community in America to do so — and abolishes all corporate rights within his borough.

"The state and federal environmental protection agencies … support the big corporations, and they really don't look after the safety of the people that I represent," Mr. Morrison told the Sun. Representatives at Lehigh Coal and Navigation did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The legal defense fund's director of education, training, and development, Richard Grossman, has said that today's federal and state laws too often condone corporate practices that pose ecological and public health hazards, such as strip mining and toxic waste dumping. The solution, his organization suggests, is to deny corporations of all their rights, thereby denying them the ability to engage in any potentially dangerous practices.

The legal fund's strategy is not without critics, of course. The president of the conservative Eagle Forum of Pennsylvania, Fran Bevan, said the "whole process undermines representative government" and "harkens to ‘radical environmentalism.'"

With nongovernmental groups such as Celdf, "elected officials … many times unknowingly give in to their agenda because it sounds like a good solution," Ms. Bevan told the Sun. Instead, she said, "I think that we need educated elected officials and need not depend on NGOs who are accountable to no one. … We certainly have enough agencies and laws that oversee sites where businesses and industries develop."

Celdf was founded in 1995 to provide legal services to environmental groups. Since that time, it has taken on the additional mission of working with rural governments to establish "home rule," the legal notion that small communities can exercise sovereignty at the local level.

About 43 states currently provide for some level of municipal home rule. According to its Web site, Celdf assists those municipalities "that are ready to take this bold step in local self-governance" by helping to draft the necessary legislation.

But in doing so, some members of these communities are going so far as to say their local laws ought to supersede federal authority, defying the Supreme Court's long-standing view that corporate entities are legal persons entitled to due process, equal protection, free speech, and other rights. Their aim is to use one or more of the anti-corporate ordinances they have passed to establish a Supreme Court test case disputing corporate personhood.

Abolitionists in the early 19th century could "have ended up demanding a slavery protection agency — you know, the equivalent of today's Environmental Protection Agency — to make slaves' conditions a little less bad," Mr. Grossman said in a 2000 speech comparing corporations to slave owners. Instead, "they denounced the Constitution" — which permitted slavery at the time — "and openly violated federal and state laws by aiding runaway slaves."

Just as judges and juries slowly changed their minds about the slave trade, Mr. Grossman said, today's public eventually will come to see corporations in a different light.

Through decades of work, abolitionists "built a political movement … with the clout to get their three constitutional amendments enacted," he added, referring to the 13th through 15th amendments.

But the young mayor of Tamaqua has less lofty goals.

"I'm trying to protect the community that voted me in," Mr. Morrison said. "Both my parents are riddled with cancer."

Several members of his 7,000-person community have been diagnosed with rare forms of the disease, and the dumping at several nearby superfund sites is to blame, Mr. Morrison said.

Schuylkill County is heavily Republican, and voters there strongly supported President Bush in the last two presidential contests, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State Bureau of Commissions, Elections, and Legislation.

Mr. Morrison, however, is a Democrat. "It's not too often you see a Democrat get elected to anything in Tamaqua," he told the Sun. Still, Mr. Morrison said he is willing to stand behind his community's new ordinance, and go to prison if necessary. The ordinance is "set up so it can be done civilly," he said. "If not, criminally."

The young mayor's spirit of civil disobedience extends beyond his rural community in eastern Pennsylvania. With active chapters in states from Alaska to Arizona, including New York, Celdf is spawning a nationwide movement with weekend workshops that cost between $300 and $400 and that are designed to encourage attendees to push for anti-corporate legislation in their communities. Called the Daniel Pennock Democracy Schools, the 10- to 20-person classes began in 2003 at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., and are named in honor of a 17-year-old boy who died after exposure to sewage sludge.

Shireen Parsons, who has organized several of the courses in Virginia, became involved with Celdf several years ago, when members of her mostly Republican community in Christiansburg, Va., began organizing against a proposed highway project.

She received a telephone call from Celdf's executive director, Thomas Linzey, who told her, "We want to litigate this for you."

After three lawsuits and three appeals, Ms. Parsons said, the courts finally ruled in favor of the corporate highway project. It was at that point that she and other Celdf members decided to change their strategy and challenge the legal system rather than work within it, she said.

State and federal laws are "set up so that we will always fail," Ms. Parsons told the Sun. "We have been working with these regulators for 40 years, and everything is worse. So we haven't gained anything from working within the system."

Lyn Gerry, the host of "Unwelcome Guests," a weekly radio show based in Watkins Glen, N.Y., has aired excerpts of Democracy Schools on her two-hour program, which is broadcast to at least 20 stations in 12 American states, Canada, and New Zealand. According to the New York State Board of Elections, residents of Schuyler County, to which Watkins Glen belongs, voted strongly in favor of Mr. Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 elections.

Ms. Gerry said her neighbors in her village of about 2,100 people have been abuzz about the Democracy Schools after recent proposals to dig a quarry and to dispose of toxic waste on nearby farmland. She added: "We've got some issues here that lend themselves" to Celdf's project, which she refers to on her show as "disobedient lawmaking."

"What underlies the Democracy School, what makes it so powerful is that it's an organizing model," she said. "The community comes to a consensus and says, ‘We have the right to decide how it is here. We're making a legal right to do it.'"

Back in Pennsylvania, not everyone is convinced.

"Our environment is the only one we have, so we need to be conscientious about our use and non-use," Ms. Bevan of the Eagle Forum said. "The question that I have concerning Celdf ... is, ‘Do we need them?' Do we have problems that are not being addressed, or are we creating problems that do not exist?"