This Is How To End Citizens United

Colorado’s Attorney General joins Montana’s battle to use the Supreme Court’s own precedent to strip corporations of their personhood status.

(Credit: DonkeyHotey, Wikimedia Commons)

Fresh off paying fines to settle a federal kickback prosecution, dialysis giant Davita this year dumped a $50,000 corporate donation into a super PAC looking to sway Colorado’s upcoming gubernatorial election. The cash from a conglomerate previously nailed in a massive Medicare fraud case was another boring piece of bad news: a reminder of how the master plan to legalize corruption - and specifically, the Citizens United decision – has empowered the most cavalier corporations to try to buy elections up and down the ballot.

But now, here’s a rare piece of exciting good news: There’s an anti-master plan to use the Supreme Court’s own precedent to effectively circumvent Citizens United’s “corporations are people” paradigm and outlaw election spending by Davita and every other corporation in states where the initiative passed.

And here’s even better news: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, one of the leading Democratic candidates for governor, has jumped aboard the campaign to pass this right now. Here’s Weiser’s Denver Post oped with Democratic State Rep. Javier Mabery:

We don’t have to wait for the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United to fix the mess we are in. Citizens in Montana are now advancing a ballot initiative to get corporate money out of politics. While the measure cannot overturn Citizens United, it proposes the next best step, removing corporations’ authority to engage in political activities in the first place. Defining in state law what corporations are allowed to do is not a new principle; it has existed in American law since the dawn of our republic.

Colorado should join Montana and advance a similar concept to change Colorado law. And it can be done by a bill from the legislature–amending our laws to make it explicit that corporations are not human beings, and, therefore, do not possess the rights of human beings.

Colorado’s law listing out corporate powers granted by the General Assembly sets out a range of powers corporations wield — like the ability to sue and be sued, to lend money, to dissolve, and so on. And it provides corporations “the same powers as an individual.” The legislature not only has the constitutional authority to modify these powers, but it has done so often — like it did in 1996, 2000, 2003, and 2019.

You might be eyerolling right now, presuming that this kind of thing only matters if all 50 states pass this kind of measure. But you would be wrong - each state can do this inside their own state, instantly weakening the power of corporations to buy elections inside their jurisdictions right now.

For more on how this all works, listen to our recent Lever Time episode that went deep on this anti-master plan.