Help Kill “Citizens United,” Montana-style!

“Each state creates and defines its corporations. It need not permit its creations to consume it.”

“By using their authority to define what corporations are—and what powers they hold—states can end the era of corporate and dark money in U.S. politics.”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-ZlQ-iOgXI)

The American public is sick of the corruption that’s now destroying laws and regulations that protect every aspect of life for the majority of Americans, in favor of deep-pocketed corporations and oligarchs, thanks to Citizens United.

Montana has already figured out the legal argument to make Citizens United irrelevant and other states can use it too. Here are the basic parts of their plan:

POWER TO ALTER OR REVOKE: each state’s laws state starkly and clearly that the state can alter—or revoke—its corporation law at any time, for any reason.
UNIVERSAL APPLICATION: every change in a state’s corporation law applies to existing corporations as well as new corporations.
OUT-OF-STATE CORPORATION PROVISIONS: The provision concerns corporations not chartered in the state, known as “foreign corporations.” This provision determines which powers a state grants to out-of-state corporations.

Action: Call our legislators and tell them we want this plan to happen here as well!

Instead of begging them to stop taking donations from corporations, where they worry that their competition will take the money if they won’t – this makes it easy for them. NOBODY GETS THE MONEY!

Minimum script: I’m calling from [zip code] and I want [State Senator/Assemblymember______] to remove Citizen United’s corporate and secret-donor money out of our local, state, and federal politics by simply declining to grant corporations doing business in our state the power to spend in politics. Montana has already created the Transparent Election Initiative to address this, and I want the [State Senator/Assemblymember______] to respond to me that they will commit to this action as well.

Contact:

State Senator Monique Limón (SD-21): email, SAC (916) 651-4021 SB (805) 965-0862, OX (805)988-1940
State Senator Henry Stern (SD-27):email, SAC (916) 651-4027, Calabasas (818) 876-3352
State Assemblymember Steve Bennett: (CA-38): email, SAC (916) 319-2038, VTA (805) 485-4745
State Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin: (CA-42): email, SAC (916) 319-2042, TO ((805) 370-0542
Not your people? Which assemblymember/state senator is mine?: findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov.

Resources

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTE1DkCLNEc)

(Robert Reich) “How to Get Rid of “Citizens United” – We can do away with it without a new Supreme Court. Nor do we need a constitutional amendment. There’s a far simpler way.”
(https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-to-get-rid-of-citizens-united)

Humans versus Corporations

(American Progress) “Every Supreme Court case on corporate political speech has asked the same question: Must a corporation have the right to speak? What the Court has never said—because it has never been asked—is that corporations must have the power to speak in the first place. This silence makes sense, since for more than a century, states have granted corporations the power to conduct all lawful acts and activities, so corporate power to speak is a question that does not come before the Supreme Court. But, as Buccola notes, “[O]ne needs to distinguish between the related but distinctive concepts of corporate rights and corporate powers.”

Because states have granted corporations powers very similar to humans for the past century and a half (for example, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s corporation law currently grants corporations “the same powers as an individual to do all things necessary or convenient to carry out its business and affairs”), courts have treated their rights similarly in the modern era.

But the power relationship humans and corporations have to government is quite different. America was founded on the proposition that humans are created fully empowered to act in the world:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Humans are born with a full set of powers; they are not given to them by the government. In fact, the opposite is true: As the declaration states, government derives all its power from the consent of the governed.

Corporate power to act in the world is significantly different. Corporations are pure creatures of law; they do not exist without law and have zero powers until a government grants them some. Once the law, through corporation statutes, grants a corporation the power to do something, the law, through regulation, shapes its rights to do that thing.”

References