As I listened today - and as you can right now --to Supreme Court justices questioning the proponents and opponents of a suit to overturn campaign-finance regulations, the main point of contention was whether the McCain-Feingold law and previous rulings violate the free-speech "rights" of those non-citizens and non-persons we call corporations. Listening in made me an enthusiast for audio (and, someday, video) coverage of the Court's public sessions.

For one thing, it was downright inspiring -- at least to me as a civic republican -- to find the formidable conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts so willfully ignorant of political and corporate life. Justice is properly blind, but not as small-minded as the justices, who sounded as if they had no understanding of what it takes to run for office or to run a corporation.

Liberals on the court are inexperienced at this, too (although Justice Sonia Sotomayor knows the corporate world firsthand). But it was conservatives who fastidiously lifted their hems above the muck of real political and economic life to justify sweeping away regulations that keep big-corporate money from overwhelming the democratic electoral and legislative process. They also all-but dismissed legal principles and doctrines as different as stare decisis and "original intent.

As Feingold noted outside the Court (and as the liberal Justice Stephen Breyer noted within), the depth, darkness, and stench of legislation corrupted by business money have shamed many less-than-noble legislators for more than a century into curbing the electoral speech of corporate interests.

And no wonder. We, the people, brought business corporations into being in the first place; allowed them to amass wealth in uniquely advantaged ways; subsidized them when they failed; and, indeed, have every right to bar them from using shareholders' investments to skew and even coerce a democratic process that is supposed to set the very rules for their money-making by reflecting the deliberations of people who -- as citizens, not just shareholders -- don't reduce their best interests to money-making alone, as corporations must by the very laws and charters that empower them.

The state has "a compelling interest" in doing this. "I don't accept the premise that corporations have rights as citizens," said McCain. Feingold agreed, noting that if they are given such rights, "the rights of the citizens will be overrun. We saw the corruption [that came from that presumption], that's why we acted."

If the court declares such legislation unconstitutional, Feingold added, "it would prevent us from legislating" in this area thereby blocking the democratic process from regulating the corporations that it created. Worse yet, once corporations have the option of inundating campaigns with their narrowly self-interested commercials, market pressures will drive them to do it.

Justice Sotomayor wondered if, indeed, the courts' real "error to start with" hadn't been its designation of corporations - in 1886, the era of the robber barons -- as "persons" in a technically legal but truly fictive sense that has emboldened their champions to claim "rights" that properly belong only to real people.

Justice Scalia, determined to ignore the First Amendment framers' original intent to protect living speakers from encroaching interests, and determined to transform the mythical corporate "person" the court has created into something that has rights to free speech, tried several gambits.

He kept emphasizing, as he has often, that 97 percent of corporations are single-shareholder outfits, mom and pop hairdressers and new car dealers who can't overwhelm public debate or buy off legislators, yet whose free speech is "silenced" by the current law's sweeping bars on direct corporate funding of campaign messages.

Scalia had to be reminded by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, chief advocate for the existing curbs, that the hairdresser or auto dealer who is the sole owner of a business can transfer some of its resources to his or her own direct advocacy as a citizen anytime he or she wants to plunge into the electoral process, without deluding or inconveniencing anyone involved in the business.

Meanwhile, if the currrent bars on big-corporate contributions were removed, the 3 percent of corporations that are huge and "owned" only by swirling whorls of shareholders who shift in and out at the click of a broker's mouse, would be able to overwhelm public debate and elections.

Nothing daunted, Scalia next wondered aloud if it's really so cynical of him to suspect that a Congress of incumbents enacted those curbs on corporate contributions not for the sake of some noble and compelling state interest but mainly to protect its own incumbency from challenge by insurgents.

Kagan had to inform this willful ignoramus that corporations give 10 times as much to incumbents as they do to insurgents, because they find it rewarding to invest in (and inflect the behavior of) the people already in office. Apparently, Scalia the Innocent had had no idea. If anything, Kagan added humorously, eliciting chuckles in the Court, McCain-Feingold may have been "the most self-denying thing Congress has ever done."

And why has Congress done it? Because the evidence that corporations were buying legislators stank to high heaven. And all that Congress actually did was require the principals of corporations to contribute separately, as individual citizens, and below certain amounts, and openly, through public disclosure, to Political Action Committees rather than to secretive front organizations like Citizens United, creator of the swift-boating "Hillary: The Movie," whose suit had prompted this hearing.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who sides with conservatives and business corporations on this, worried piously if such legislation, however well intentioned, has the effect of silencing corporations that, after all, are often the most knowledgeable about many of the industries and practices that Congress regulates.

Kagan had to inform Kennedy that nothing in campaign-finance legislation silences corporate lobbyists, who swarm all over the Hill, in and out of committee rooms where legislation is being drafted. By barring direct corporate contributions to campaigns against legislators who've crossed corporate interests, she said, "we're only separating persuasion [in lobbying] from coercion."

Chief Justice Roberts became exercised against claims that if big business corporations are allowed to contribute directly to campaigns against legislators they don't like, they'll use their shareholders' investments for purposes to those shareholders themselves weren't consulted about. Like Alice in wonderland, Roberts wondered if it wouldn't be "extraordinarily paternalistic" of the government assume that shareholders can't "keep track "of what the corporations they own are doing.

Moreover, he asked rhetorically, don't corporations have interests just as diverse as those of individual citizens, since corporations, too, take different sides on different issues?

I'm not sure that Kagan or the liberal justices really succeeded in explaining to Roberts that corporations are barred by their charters and by law and by competitive market pressures from pursuing interests any more diverse than the narrow and all-important one of keeping their stock prices up every quarter, whatever it takes, and that any of their managers or employees who pursue the greater public good while on the job will soon lose both their mandate and their jobs.

Corporations therefore don't deliberate in any republican sense that the framers of the First Amendment meant to protect. Only living, breathing people can do that, transcending their self-interest at times in dialogue with others.

As for using shareholders' money for electoral purposes which some shareholders wouldn't approve, Kagan had to inform Roberts that shareholders can't possibly keep track of dozens of corporations' activities when their ownership of them is shifted off and on constantly by mutual funds and retirement plans and that therefore the whole notion of republican intentionality in public deliberation is corrupted.

Our conservative guardians of the republic seem unable to understand this kind of corruption. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to remind them that conservatives had no problem being "paternalistic" when it came to zealously "protecting" members of labor unions from having any of their dues money used in election campaigns.

After listening to all this, I'm certainly for making public these audio transcripts of our great judicial minds deliberating about the meaning and fate of the republic. As a disinterested citizen, I appreciate being able to hear Roberts stumble through realities even more basic than the presidential oath that he flubbed while he was administering it to Barack Obama. But if this is how he deliberates, I hate to imagine how big business corporations do it.