WHAT IS A CITIZEN?

A little over fifteen years ago, America gave birth to a child. This child could not hear you, could not see you, and could not feel you. In fact, it had no senses at all in the typical understanding. It was not even a person as any rational person would conceive of the idea of personhood. In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court equated corporations and media companies with human citizens when holding that you could not limit political contributions for any of them. Implicit in their reasoning was the assumption that political donations and free speech are the same thing.

This allowed the Court to extend the First Amendment protection of the latter to the former. Further, since you could not limit the amount of speech, you could not do that for political donations. Of course, most people don’t have a lot of money to spend on campaigns (most Americans don’t even have any savings) whereas corporations have lots of dough in their war chest to unleash on elections and other issue campaigns. Also, many people don’t equate free speech with political donations. However, these nine people get to make the rules and that’s what they did here.

Let’s briefly reflect on how these new rules have impacted American society over the last decade and a half, regardless of how you feel about the original holding. Twenty years ago, political action committee (PAC) spending was virtually zero. Now, it accounts for several billion dollars worth of campaign money each election cycle, roughly four or five billion. Direct corporate spending is about twenty percent of that figure. Corporations tend to funnel their political donation money through PACs in order to muddy the waters as to their financial political involvement in elections. However, a lot of PAC money comes from a small number of extremely wealthy people. This leaves us with the reality of an elite group of people controlling the landscape of elections. This situation is exacerbated by the need for candidates to solicit donations from these spheres of influence.

Recently, some states have begun fighting back against these developments. Hawaii has led the way, but many others soon followed. Leaders in the far-flung island state have discerned and dispersed a modern and novel take off of this Supreme Court ruling. While the court said that corporations, and unions for that matter, have unlimited ability to spend on political donations because it should be considered speech, they did not speak to the definition or parameters of corporate power ex ante. Hawaii politicians rightfully reasoned that since corporations are a creation of state law, their creation can come with strings and these issues in general should be decided by the states where corporations are formed. Specifically, states can define the rights of corporations prior to their formation in a way that limits their corporate direct and indirect political spending. To be clear though, states can strip them of these powers before their creation but not after these quasi-citizens are “born.”

Activists in over a dozen states have been organizing to effect this change. Some notable ones include California, Massachusetts, and Montana. Hopefully, real “citizens” all over will realize this opportunity to push back against the Frankenstein’s monster the Supreme Court has created and allow for voters to influence elections more than ultra-rich citizens and corporations funneling their money through opaque organizations.

We need transparency. We need the stage of political debate to be occupied by the real people that live in this country. If this were the case, then perhaps voter turnout would rise, and voter apathy will fall. We may see a new birth of optimism and progress. Critical issues shoved to the side can reappear as the pet projects of special interest groups fade from view as their money and influence wane in significance. Only time will tell but it is interesting to see state governments legislating around the Supreme Court. To be sure, this is the general population rebuking and governing over the rulings of nine unelected people without much in common with the rest of us—all of them went to Harvard or Yale minus one, who went to Notre Dame. Americans should decide American elections, not corporate zombies or their sycophants in the Supreme Court.