A bold, new approach to undoing Citizens United

What if the answer to undoing the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision has been hiding in plain sight for the past 15 years?

An innovative proposal designed to stop corporate and dark money spending in elections has arisen in Montana, where a nonpartisan nonprofit advocacy group called the Transparent Election Initiative is working to advance a ballot measure that would rewrite the law from which corporate charters draw their authority and stop giving corporations the power to spend unlimited sums of money in elections. The idea has already garnered support from high-profile political figures across the political spectrum in Montana — including former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot, former Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, and former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. Issue One has also endorsed the proposal.

The idea behind the so-called Montana Plan is simple: Corporations only have the powers granted to them by their state corporation law, and electioneering need not be one of these powers.

During the early years of the United States, corporations were often restricted to the activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose and were forbidden from engaging in other ventures. Some corporate charters were narrowly tailored around public works projects like bridges, canals, and water systems. And many corporate charters were granted for a limited time (such as 20 years or 50 years), and were subject to renewal by the state legislature.

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In more recent American history, states have generally taken a more expansive approach to what powers are given to corporations, but this approach isn’t set in stone. As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Tom Moore has written, “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.”

For more than a century, reformers have worked to curb corporate power in politics. In 1907, then-President Theodore Roosevelt signed an anti-corruption measure known as the Tillman Act into law that prohibited corporations from contributing money “in connection with political elections.” But the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010 reversed course, holding that corporations, including certain nonprofit corporations, could legally use their general treasury funds for political advertisements that overtly call for the election or defeat of candidates.

In the post-Citizens United world, some examples of corporate electioneering have been overt, such as ride-hailing company Uber sponsoring campaign mailers and e-mail messages to its riders and drivers urging them to support specific candidates.

Other examples have been designed to be intentionally opaque, such as when major drug companies funneled $1 million through their main trade association, known as Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PhRMA, to a secretive dark money organization called Freedom Path, which helped then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) beat back a conservative primary challenger during his 2012 reelection campaign.

During the 2024 election cycle alone, secretive dark money groups, nonprofits, and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors, spent more than $1.9 billion, a dramatic increase from the prior record of $1 billion in 2020, according to a Brennan Center for Justice analysis by OpenSecrets alumna Anna Massoglia.

Now, this first-in-the-nation ballot measure is poised to strike a stake through the heart of the corporate electioneering that has exploded since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

As former Gov. Marc Racicot (R-MT) has said: “By declining to hand out corporate political-spending powers from the outset, Montana can chart a constitutional course others may follow — showing that bold, effective, and principled reform is still possible across party lines.”

Want to help Issue One and the Transparent Election Initiative evangelize about this important issue at the SXSW conference in Texas next year? Please take a minute to vote for our panel about how this proposal will block corporate and dark money election spending at the source.

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