[00:00:00] For 16 years, American politics has been bought and paid for by invisible corporate money. We’ve been told there was nothing we could do about it, and that the Supreme Court made its decision and that was that. But now that changes. One state just decided it’s done asking for permission.
Before we get into the details, let’s look at the source of this problem. In 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. This ruling effectively opened the floodgates for billions in dark money political spending by groups that aren’t required to disclose where their money is coming from.
Now, the state of Hawaii is taking a radically different approach. Instead of [00:01:00] arguing about free speech, they are challenging the legal existence of corporations themselves. Let’s see how they’re doing it
[ Clip from Ali Velshi on MSNOW:
I wanna begin this hour with a simple question that many of you have been screaming at your TV screens for some time now.
To whom does this democracy, whose 250th anniversary we are celebrating this year, to whom does this democracy actually belong? Same question raised earlier this month by the Hawaiian Republican State Representative Kanani Souza as she opened the floor debate on a bill that effectively bans corporate spending on elections in her state.
If you haven’t seen Souza’s speech, you absolutely should look it up and watch it. Here’s a clip:
Hawaii State Rep Souza: Hawaii is not waiting for permission not following the lead of others we are leading we are making history by restoring a fundamental truth power [00:02:00] belongs to people not corporations especially political power for too long we have lived with a legal fiction that a corporation can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a human being in the political arena that it can spend without limit influence without accountability and project a voice so powerful that it overwhelms the very people our Constitution was written to protect but here in Hawaii we are not bound to accept that outcome as inevitable
Ali Velshi on MSNOW:
This is a very big deal. Hawaii just did something remarkable and genuinely historic. It passed a bill into law with near unanimous bipartisan support that effectively bans corporations from spending money to influence state elections, and it did this by redefining what powers a corporation actually has. [00:03:00] Hawaii Governor Josh Green signed it on May 14th, making Hawaii- ]
And see, that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize, is that states have more power than many people think.
When you start a business, whether it’s an LLC or corporation, you have to go through your state’s secretary of state office, and you have to sign a lot of documents. You have to file a lot of paperwork, and it’s completely up to the state as to whether or not you can become a business or not. So states give that power, and they can take it away.
So Hawaii has just done the remarkable thing of trying to bypass Citizens United, which puts the power back into the people’s hands, because the average person is not a billionaire. The average person is not a [00:04:00] billion-dollar corporation with endless amounts of money that they could spend on their certain candidate or on a super PAC.
Now, full disclosure, there’s limits that one person can donate to a political campaign, but there’s no limit in how much a corporation can spend on a super PAC, and that’s where the power comes from. Because I don’t know if y’all remember this, but during the 2024 campaign, super PACs used gender-affirming care as a attack ad against Kamala Harris.
If it wasn’t for Citizens United, maybe they wouldn’t have had the money to run those ads in all those swing states taking Kamala Harris’s words out of context. That is just one of the tactics that they used to sway that election. Those super PACs have a lot of money and a lot of leeway [00:05:00] To just do whatever.
And it completely muddles the waters where the will of the people gets drowned out.
Clip of Ali Velshi on MSNOW
[ The first state in the nation to take on Citizens United and doing so in a way that no state has done before. This is good news because it’s a model that at least a dozen other states are working on following.
Now, obviously, you know the story of Citizens United, but it’s worth repeating. In 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that corporations, like people, have a constitutional right, a First Amendment right, to spend unlimited money in elections. Soon after that decision, the floodgates opened, as you would expect.
From 2010 to 2024, outside groups spent more than $4 billion with a B on federal elections alone. Dark money, spending by groups that are not required to disclose their donors, hit a record $1.9 [00:06:00] billion in the last presidential cycle. State Senator Carl Rhodes, the Hawaiian bill’s lead author, noting the scale of the problem, said, quote, In 2006, dark money was less than $5 million nationwide.
In 2024, there was over a billion dollars with a B anonymously spent in the presidential election alone, end quote. For more than a decade, decade since that infamous ruling, Americans were told that there was nothing to be done. You want to fix it? Good luck. Amend the Constitution. Good luck waiting for a different Supreme Court.
But a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress named Tom Moore did not accept that. And what he came up with is, frankly, very clever. Moore’s insight was this. Citizens United asked whether the government could regulate a corporation’s right to spend money in elections. The court said no, it could not.
But the Supreme Court was never asked, nor did it ask, a different, more fundamental question. Does a corporation have the power, not the right, [00:07:00] the power to spend money on elections in the first place? And that question, it turns out, belongs entirely to the states. Here’s the key to understanding this.
Corporations are not born. They are, in fact, created by state law. Unlike humans who are actually born, corporations are created by state law. They are given their powers by state law. They are dependent on state law for their very existence, which is why people choose to incorporate in various different states based on the rights that that state offers.
Anyone who-]
Exactly. Exactly. A state like Delaware has over 66% of the Fortune 500 companies incorporated there Meaning if Delaware were to pass a law like this, that would effectively end Citizens United. Companies like Chase, CVS, and Amazon are incorporated in Delaware, and they have spent millions in the 2024 election cycle.
[00:08:00] So Citizens United going away in Delaware would effectively stop them from being able to meddle in elections. But we also need other states to get on board with this, too. California is home to companies like Apple, and Apple will be governed by California’s laws. Not saying that Apple spends money in elections, but I’m just saying if they wanted to, if California passed a law like this, it would stop companies with as deep of pockets as Apple from being able to spend in elections.
Clip of Ali Velshi from MSNOW
[-even has a small company knows that a corporation in America is a state entity.
Chief Justice John Marshall established this principle in 1819, writing that, quote, “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”
End quote. Pretty simple writing. In other words, corporations only [00:09:00] exist because states created them and gave them their powers, things like the right to own property, to sign contracts, to sue, and to be sued. That 200-year-old Supreme Court decision has never been superseded. So Tom Moore’s strategy, he calls it the corporate power reset, builds directly on this concept.
States create corporations. States grant corporations their power. States have always retained the authority to rewrite that list. And what the state grants, the state can take back. So instead of trying to restrict corporate speech, which is the, where Citizens United dwells and where states have lost repeatedly in federal court, Hawaii simply decided that it will decline to grant corporations that power in the first place.
It is a subtle distinction, but it may be a legally and politically consequential one. It makes Citizens United irrelevant, at least within the borders of states that adopt this new way of thinking about it. Hawaii’s new law, which takes [00:10:00] effect on July 1st of next year, redefines corporations doing business in the state as entities that do not possess the power to spend money on elections or ballot measures.
It does not eliminate super PACs, but it cuts off their most corrosive fuel source: anonymous corporate money. Super PACs can still op- ]
Elections should be paid for by the people. Political campaigns and organizations should seek donations from the people. Corporations shouldn’t be nowhere near that.
In a perfect world, elections would be grassroots, with $20 here, $30 there from actual voters. You shouldn’t need a billion dollars to run for president. That’s not how it used to be. We, as a people, need to reset the way we think about elections. It can’t be just about getting the US House, the US Senate, [00:11:00] and the presidency.
We need to think about local elections, state and local elections, because these states hold a lot of power in this country, because they’re basically 50 little countries I don’t know if anybody else thinks about it that way, but that’s how I think about it. Each state is basically its own little country; all formed under the Constitution and the federal government of the United States.
So they hold a lot of power in these corporations and how we conduct elections, as we have found out. So it is increasingly important that we make sure we’re paying attention to our state legislatures, to our governors, state secretaries of state, and state attorneys general, because these are important positions.
So we can’t just go to [00:12:00] the polls with whoever’s running for US House or US Senate or for the president. We have to focus on when our state elects its legislature and show up in that election. And with Citizens United being effectively gone, if states get on board with this, it makes it that much easier
