Try A New Way To Undo Citizens United, Stop Corporate Money in Politics

A compromised Supreme Court opened the floodgates with Citizens United, and now American democracy is drowning in corporate money. Creative advocates have suggested a new way to try to keep our heads above water: rewriting state codes to explicitly deny chartered corporations the authority to spend in elections. Our state should step up and pursue this lifeline to reclaim power for regular people. We’ve spent a decade and a half watching in horror as corporations bought the vote with limitless, often secret spending, believing there was nothing we could do to stop them without amending the U.S. Constitution. But it’s a clear and legally uncontroversial fact that corporations derive their authority from the states, and states can define what they can and can’t do. That’s something we can and must use to disrupt this crooked system. The fight is already well underway. Hawai’i just became the first state in the nation to put this plan into practice, passing S.B. 2471 into law. Similar bills have been introduced in 14 other states. It’s also being pursued as a ballot initiative in Montana. This is not a silver bullet to make bribing politicians illegal again, and of course well-heeled corporate attorneys will use their massive resources to wage legal war on it. But it is a step forward, and a much-needed restraint in a campaign finance system that’s destroyed most meaningful limits and silenced normal Americans. It’s also a rejection of the ridiculous idea of “corporate personhood” that has been forced on us by the puppets of the powerful. Corporations are piles of paper, created by law and subject to it, and we’re going to act like it. The billionaires and the big corporations have hijacked our politics. We need to be willing to try every tool available to us to make it work for us, and not the oligarchs. Please help make this plan to undo Citizens United law in our state as soon as possible.