A New Way to Beat Citizens United

Let's get corporations out of politics!

Author

Ron Davis
April 03, 2026

Money in politics has been extraordinarily destructive to the health of our democracy. The debate often gets hung up on “how much” the money impacts elections. And it often misses the obvious fact that all that money influences the way politicians act. We have a coin-operated political establishment! I

Citizens United was a turning point. Beside being a stupid decision on the merits, our Supreme Court gave corporations the ability to spend infinitely in politics. And now the servile political class increasingly does their bidding.

But there is (amazing!) effort afoot that might provide a workaround. It won’t get all of money out of politics, unfortunately. But it is promising for getting corporations out, which would be a HUGE step. Here is how it works:

Some leading legal scholars have come up with an idea to use corporate law instead of speech law to fix the problem. While states are not allowed to limit the speech of corporations, states have a different right that is extremely, repeatedly, settled law. They grant corporations the ability to exist, and the states get to decide what that existence includes and does not include - as in, what these corporations can and cannot do. And when other corporations do business in these states, they have to abide by the same laws.

The idea here, then, is simply to restructure their enabling statutes to prevent them from engaging in political speech.

Here are some key sections of a writeup from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance:

Citizens United (558 U.S. 310) held that lawmakers cannot regulate a corporation’s right to spend independently in elections. But regulations are just one tool in the legislative toolbox. Another extraordinarily powerful tool has gone largely unexamined until now: every state’s virtually unlimited authority to define the powers it grants its corporations.

Corporations have only the powers that states give them—no more. States stopped being choosy about the powers they granted to their corporations in the mid-1800s. But every single state retained the authority to be as choosy as they like. Every single state retains the authority to decide to no longer grant its corporations the power to spend in politics.

No state has exercised its clear power to exclude political spending from the powers it grants its corporations. “Why not?” asks University of Chicago law professor Vincent S.J. Buccola. “One possibility is that the average legislator thinks cases such as Citizens United and Hobby Lobby were sensibly decided. This might be true—it is unlikely—but in any event it is uninteresting. Another possibility is that legislators do not know their own legislative authority. If so, maybe they will soon discover it.” . . .

The difference between regulating rights and declining to grant powers is not semantic. It is doctrinal. It is foundational. And this may make The Montana Plan the most promising new strategy to eliminate corporate and dark money in politics since the day Citizens United was decided . . .

This structure draws upon two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence regarding corporate powers. The Court has held that states may define, limit, or revoke corporate powers for any reason, or for no reason at all. “That body need give no reason for its action in the matter,” the Court held in Greenwood v. Freight Co. (105 U.S. 13, 17 (1882)). “The validity of such action does not depend on the necessity for it, or on the soundness of the reasons which prompted it.”

Tom Moore, Center for American Progress

For more on this - here is the website -

Transparent Election Initiative

A bipartisan team of former Montana officials have unveiled an oddly simple yet startlingly robust legal mechanism for undoing Citizens United that ...

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance • Tom Moore

Sadly, this kind of ambitious proposal is exactly the kind of thing the political establishment in Olympia is uninterested in actually doing. So many of them would rather campaign on “saving democracy” from Trump while tinkering around the edges and not actually saving democracy. We will likely need an initiative to make this happen unless the gaggle of left challenges this year turns into a slate of wins and scares the legislature into upgrading their behavior. I’ll certainly fight for it if I make it through!

This Montana initiative is the coolest legal innovation I’ve seen in a long time. If in Washington we paired this with ranked-choice voting, publicly funded elections, and consolidation to even years when most people vote - we might start to actually see a political class that represents what the people want!

I don’t say any of this to set aside the deep federal work that must be done. Obviously as soon as we can, we need to expand the court dramatically, depoliticize it by creating randomized rotations (including from the appeals courts) and term limits, and then rebuild constitutional law. Then we need to get all private money out of politics.

But in the meantime, this is pretty damn cool! I have added it to my own platform. I hope you will support it.