Most people who are frustrated with the influence of corporate money in our politics have been told the same thing for 16 years solid: there’s nothing we can do about it. The Supreme Court decided in Citizens United that corporations have a constitutional right to spend in elections, and that’s that.

If you want to fix it, you need a constitutional amendment, or a different Supreme Court, or both. Good luck.

We don’t buy it. And neither should you.

A Special Commentary Project

Civil Beat is focusing on transparency, accountability and ethics in government and other institutions. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org.

Read More

One of us is a Democrat. One of us is a Republican. There’s plenty we don’t agree on. But we do agree that dark money is poisoning our democracy. And we do agree that the state of Hawai’i has the authority — and the responsibility — to get rid of it.

A bill moving in the Hawaiʻi Legislature right now — Senate Bill 2471 — takes a completely different approach. It’s not a workaround. It’s not a protest resolution. It’s a genuine legal solution, built on tools that have been sitting in our state law for decades, waiting to be used.

More: Can Hawaiʻi Deliver All Of America From Citizens United?

At the heart of SB 2471 is something we all know: corporations are not natural. They don’t spring into existence on their own. They exist because states created them and then gave them all their powers — the power to own property, sign contracts, sue and be sued, and so forth — all the things that allow them to function as economic actors.

Every one of those powers is a grant from the state. For most of American history, these were carefully selected and limited lists of individual powers, and that list never, ever included the power to spend in politics.

That changed in the early 20th century, not because of any constitutional requirement, but because states started writing corporate codes with sweeping, catch-all grants of power. Hawaiʻi grants corporations “the same powers as an individual to do all things necessary or convenient to carry out its business and affairs.”

When deciding Citizens United, the Supreme Court simply assumed that Virginia’s broad power grant — identical to ours — gave Citizens United (the Virginia nonprofit corporation) the power to spend in politics. Its starting point was a plaintiff that had the power to spend in politics. And because it had been given that power, its right to exercise that power could not be infringed.

But the court did not say that the state had to grant that power in the first place.

That’s where SB 2471 operates. It doesn’t regulate corporate speech. It doesn’t try to limit a right. It rewrites Hawaiʻi’s corporate code to slightly shorten the list of powers that corporations operating in our state actually have — and political spending power isn’t on the list.

Nothing about how corporations do business in Hawai‘i changes. Corporations can still lobby. They can still testify before committees, publish white papers, run advertising about their products. They can do everything a business legitimately needs to do. They just can’t pour money into our politics.

Hawai‘i is leading the way on this reform. But we’re not alone. States from California to Minnesota to Vermont to Rhode Island have introduced legislation along the same lines — 14 total. Montana citizen activists are gathering signatures to put the question directly to voters this fall. This is fast becoming a movement, and no one is as close to getting it done as we are.

What gives us confidence this will hold up in court? Every state has a clear provision in its laws that says the state can modify the powers it gives to corporations at any time — or get rid of them altogether.

Ours says this: “The Legislature has the power to amend or repeal all or part of this chapter at any time and all domestic and foreign corporations subject to this chapter are governed by the amendment or repeal.”

The United States Supreme Court has held for more than 100 years that these provisions mean what they say, and that the state can change any of those powers anytime, for any reason whatsoever. Every corporation has been on notice that this can happen, so they have no basis to object if it does.

Wielding this provision to clean up our politics isn’t radical. What’s radical is what we’ve been doing for the past 16 years: allowing the artificial entities we create to spend unlimited sums in our politics and drown out the voices of the human beings who created them.

We are asking our colleagues in the House to pass SB 2471 out of the chamber and then for the Consumer Protection and Judiciary chairs on the House and Senate sides to work together to move it out of conference.

This is the moment for all of Hawai‘i — Republicans, Democrats and independents — to work together to do something genuinely historic yet oddly simple: stop giving the corporations that operate on our islands the power to spend in our politics.