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No, it was about the clown shown last night, The State of the Union. It was about the power a state has to prevent a corporation from donating to campaigns.
You may remember that back in November I mentioned that Montana was considering a bill that would effectively negate the Supreme Court’s awful Citizens United decision, which held that corporations are people under the First Amendment and therefore entitled to spend unlimited amounts of corporate money in elections.
A similar bill has just been introduced in California.
Between 2008 and 2024, reported “independent” expenditures by outside groups exploded more than 28-fold — from $144 million to $4.21 billion. Unreported money also skyrocketed, with dark money groups spending millions influencing the 2024 election.
Most people assume that the only way to stop corporate and dark money in American politics is either to wait for the Supreme Court to undo Citizens United (we could wait a very long time) or amend the U.S. Constitution (which is extraordinarily difficult).
But there’s another way, and there’s a good chance it will work. It will be on the ballot next November in Montana. And there’s now a chance California could enact it!
As I’ve pointed out, individual states have the authority to limit corporate political activity and dark money spending, because states determine what powers corporations have.
When a state exercises its authority to define corporations as entities without the power to spend in politics, it will no longer be relevant whether corporations have a right to spend in politics — because without the power to do so, the right to do so has no meaning. (Delaware’s corporation code already declines to grant private foundations the power to spend in elections.)
Importantly, a state that no longer grants its corporations the power to spend in elections also denies that power to corporations chartered in the other 49 states, if they wish to do business in that state.
And what corporation doesn’t want to do business in California?
All a state needs to do is enact a law with a provision something like this:
“Every corporation operating under the laws of this state has all the corporate powers it held previously, except that nothing in this statute grants or recognizes any power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity.”
Sound farfetched? Not at all.
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