Hawaii’s Doing This: “Citizens United” Is Easily Defeated

*I am shocked, shocked to see something proposed here actually (kinda) happening.*

In the fourth post on this blog, six and half years ago, I suggested that any state could solve the whole “corporations are people too” nonsense by explicitly stating that no, they aren’t.

And now a state is kinda doing that.

It’s Hawaii, with SB 2471, which has now passed through their legislature and is on to the governor for signing.

It’s not exactly what I’d proposed, though.

I had suggested that:

All it takes to eliminate the entire clusterfuck caused by the Citizens United decision is for a state to change its incorporation law to say explicitly that corporations chartered by that state are not legally people. Better still would be for the citizens of a state to pass a constitutional amendment saying that the state is not empowered to create legal people.

SB 2471’s purpose is stated as:

(1) Reaffirm that artificial persons created under state law possess only those powers that are necessary or convenient to carry out lawful business and organizational purposes, and that those powers do not include the power to spend money or contribute anything of value to influence elections or ballot measures; and
(2) Establish penalties for violations.

So, pretty good but not exactly what I was after.

They kept the “artificial persons” concept, which leaves the door open for more trouble.

Specifically, it will let the federal courts continue to apply civil rights and equal protection law to corporations; potentially, the Supreme Court could just invalidate this whole law as an imposition on corporations’ civil rights that way.

So, this is a good start and long overdue and before the current Supreme Court went all-in on the fascist coup-ing it might have been enough.

But in the current United States we’re likely to need the stronger version of this to make it stick.