Hawaii Just Declared War on Citizens United
While the rest of America shrugged, one state finally did something about the billionaires buying our elections.
By David Shuster
In an era when American democracy has been corrupted by billionaires, lobbyists, and corporate “dark money,” the State of Hawaii has just done something extraordinary. Hawaii’s legislature and Governor have attempted to restore a simple and almost quaint principle: corporations and the plutocrat class should not possess the unrestricted right to purchase U.S. election outcomes and buy local, state, and federal governments.
For sixteen years now, our nation has labored beneath the grotesque farce known as “Citizens United,” that infamous 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in which the conservative Justices declared that corporations enjoy the same political speech rights of actual citizens.
The decision was hailed in conservative and GOP circles as a triumph of liberty, similar to how a pick pocket celebrates crowded streets.
Citizens United remains one of the most preposterous acts of judicial alchemy in American history. The Court took a legal fiction—a corporation, that contraption devised primarily to shield wealthy people from accountability—and transformed it into a kind of secular archangel entitled to dump limitless money into elections. The conservative Justices might as well have granted voting rights to parking meters and emotional understanding to slot machines.
The defenders of Citizens United have spent years insisting that money is speech. By that reasoning, a bank vault is a Shakespearean monologue.
The practical consequences have been grotesque. Ever since the 2010 court ruling, our democracy has been lowered into a meat grinder.
Elections have been dominated by billionaires, industrial syndicates, crypto-speculating degenerates, pharmaceutical monopolists, fossil-fuel emperors, and assorted corporate swamp-creatures whose patriotic devotion to the common good extends as far as the quarterly earnings report.
The average citizen enters this carnival with a vote. The oligarch arrives with a checkbook large enough to purchase senators, governors, think tanks, newspaper columnists, and a Labrador retriever, I mean Fox Business News pundit, trained to bark “free market principles” whenever taxes on hedge funds are mentioned.
And still, our nation has been instructed by most republicans and conservatives to regard this eruption of sewage as democracy.
sponsored
Speaking of corporate money rotting democracy…
Citizens United didn’t just let billionaires buy politicians. It let them buy the news you read about those politicians.
Every story you scroll past has an owner. A board. A donor. A slant. And most outlets won’t tell you whose hand is up the puppet’s back.
Ground News will.
It pulls every major story from every major source — left, right, and the lonely middle — and shows you exactly who’s covering it, who’s burying it, and who’s spinning it. Bias ratings. Ownership data. Blindspot alerts for the stories one side is pretending didn’t happen.
It’s the closest thing to a Citizens United decoder ring you can install on your phone.
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Hawaii took back their elections. Take back your news feed.
The genius of Hawaii’s new law lies in its refusal to bow down before this lunacy. Hawaii has calmly revived an elementary truth: Corporations exist because the public permits them to exist. They are chartered by states. They are granted privileges by states. They are creatures of law—not celestial beings floating above our nation dispensing wisdom from mahogany boardrooms.
Yet under Citizens United, corporations acquired political influence vastly exceeding the influence of ordinary Americans. The nurse in Cleveland possesses one vote. ExxonMobil possesses an ocean of cash sufficient to flood any campaign with political ads, buy all the politicians running for any office, and get nearly total deregulation of the fossil fuel industry.
Hawaii’s lawmakers looked at his absurdity and did something almost extinct in modern American politics: they displayed courage.
Not performative courage of the sort practiced by cable-news pundits and congressional windbags who “fight” corruption by sending fundraising emails about it. Actual courage. The sort involving risk. The sort involving powerful enemies. The sort involving corporate lawyers descending upon the state like locusts carrying briefcases.
Naturally, the priesthood of plutocracy is already shrieking. Conservative blowhards who regard billionaires with the reverence medieval monks reserved for saints are clutching their pearls over the possibility that corporations may someday lose the sacred right to purchase attack ads in every television commercial break through the election.
One can barely contain the tears.
These conservatives speak of Citizens United as though it were the Magna Carta rather than a judicial hallucination authored during America’s great age of corporate worship. They treat criticism of unlimited campaign spending as an assault on liberty itself. By this logic, a thief’s freedom to point a gun at a convenience store clerk and empty the cash register must also be protected as expressions of personal creativity.
But Hawaii has exposed the central fraud.
Citizens United was never principally about liberty. It was about power. Specifically, the power of concentrated wealth to dominate the political machinery while wrapping itself in claims of constitutional principle.
And let’s be clear. This domination has poisoned every aspect of American public life. Congress behaves not like a legislature but as a concierge service for wealthy donors and their corporate Political Action Committees. Climate policy is drafted under the watchful gaze of oil executives. Drug pricing legislation emerges from negotiations conducted with pharmaceutical barons whose business model depends upon charging dying people extravagant sums for crucial medicine. Defense contractors roam through Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon with the logic and stench of slobbering, rabid dogs.
The result is a nation where citizens increasingly suspect—correctly—that the government no longer belongs to them.
That is why Hawaii’s law matters far beyond the islands themselves. It represents a rare and glorious refusal to surrender to inevitability. It announces that democracy does not need to remain a subsidiary of multinational capital. If a corporation wants to operate in Hawaii, that corporation must operate in accordance with Hawaii’s laws (including the new one) and stop buying local, state and federal election campaigns in Hawaii.
Other states should follow Hawaii’s lead immediately.
Let California do it. Let Illinois do it. Let Massachusetts, Oregon, Minnesota, and every state not yet entirely converted into a corporate pass through adopt similar laws. Imagine a coalition of states demanding that democracy belong to citizens again. Imagine governors and lawmakers refusing to accept that American elections must forever function as investment opportunities for corporate interests.
That movement would not merely challenge Citizens United. It would challenge the deeper assumption that wealth should determine political voice.
Opponents are already howling that this action by the Hawaii legislature and Governor threatens the First Amendment. But the First Amendment was written to protect human liberty and democratic debate—not to guarantee ExxonMobil, pharmaceutical conglomerates, or hedge funds the unlimited ability to purchase political outcomes.
Corporations are not citizens. They do not vote. They do not serve on juries. They do not die in wars. They do not possess consciences, families, or civic obligations. They are legal instruments designed to conduct commerce. Allowing them to dominate elections distorts democracy into something the Founders would not recognize.
Hawaii’s legislature and Governor deserve praise not because their law is politically safe, but because it is politically courageous. They recognized that democracy cannot survive indefinitely when money becomes indistinguishable from power. They chose to confront one of the most corrosive Supreme Court rulings of modern times instead of surrendering to it.
The rest of America should pay attention.
If democracy is ever going to be reclaimed from corporate domination and dark-money manipulation, it will begin with states bold enough to challenge the status quo. Hawaii has struck a blow, not just against Citizens United but against the entire diseased philosophy underlying it; the cancerous notion that democracy exists to flatter and enrich those already powerful.
Other states should join Hawaii’s political luau and remind the nation that government of the people still means something.
sponsored
Speaking of corporate money rotting democracy…
Citizens United didn’t just let billionaires buy politicians. It let them buy the news you read about those politicians.
Every story you scroll past has an owner. A board. A donor. A slant. And most outlets won’t tell you whose hand is up the puppet’s back.
Ground News will.
It pulls every major story from every major source — left, right, and the lonely middle — and shows you exactly who’s covering it, who’s burying it, and who’s spinning it. Bias ratings. Ownership data. Blindspot alerts for the stories one side is pretending didn’t happen.
It’s the closest thing to a Citizens United decoder ring you can install on your phone.
Blue Amp readers get 40% off at ground.news/blue
Thank you Hawaii for doing this honorable move!👍👍👍
I stand with Hawaii on this from Las Vegas NV. Citizens United was a horrid ruling. How in the hell can the very rich have more than 1 voice in elections. 1 through their vote and 2 from the ads they create that are 95% lies. BTW how is it that you’re allowed to lie in campaign ads but you can’t lie in product advertisements? Lies should never be allowed in either type of ad