More: The legal strategy developed by the Center for American Progress"the "Corporate Power Reset""will, state by state, drain corporate and dark money from American politics. It does not overturn Citizens United; it makes it irrelevant.
Corporations are pure creatures of state law. And for more than two centuries, the Supreme Court has affirmed that states have virtually unlimited authority to modify and withdraw the powers they grant to their corporations.
This report explains how every state can use that authority to remove corporate and dark money from its local, state, and federal politics.
"Even if the Supreme Court decreed that humans had a constitutional right to fly, there is no amount of arm flapping that would result in humans taking to the skies, because they would still lack that ability."
Likewise, when a state exercises its authority to define corporations as entities without the power to spend in politics, it will no longer be relevant to discuss whether the corporations have a right to spend in politics, because without the power to do so, the right to do so has no meaning.
Every scrap of corporate speech jurisprudence centers on rights and the authority of government to regulate them"and courts have consistently held that authority to be sharply circumscribed. The jurisprudence regarding states' authority to grant powers to the corporations they create is entirely separate, and for more than a century, courts have consistently held that power-granting authority to be all but absolute.