Has Citizens United's Achilles Heel Been Hiding in State Corporate Law?

The 2024 election cyle shattered records for billionaire influence in American politics. Wealthy donors and their families spent over $2.6 billion, accounting for nearly 20 percent of all federal election spending.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, billionaire spending in elections has multiplied by a factor of 163. More than 80 percent of what billionaires spent in 2024 flowed through channels that were illegal before Citizens United.

Outside spending on campaigns grew from $574 million in 2008 to $4.5 billion in 2024. Dark money expenditures, where the funding source remains secret, increased from less than $5 million in 2006 to more than $1 billion in the 2024 presidential elections alone.

Billionaires provided 15 percent of all federal election financing that cycle, easily outspending the millions of small donors giving to House and Senate candidates.

Political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern examined 1,800 policy proposals over 30 years to determine whether America still functioned as a democracy. Their findings proved unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention. They showed that political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups. The influence of ordinary citizens registered at what they termed a “non-significant, near-zero level.” Their conclusion: America operates not as a democracy but as a functional oligarchy. Public satisfaction with democracy in the United States has reached record lows.

The Supreme Court shows no signs of reversing course, the opposite even seems to be happening as they show themselves to be what one anonymous expert has described as “fully and exclusively tools…of Republican single party rule.”

In July 2025, the Court agreed to hear a new challenge to campaign finance restrictions. Republicans are seeking to overturn limits on how much party committees can spend in coordination with individual candidates.

The case involves coordinated party expenditure limits, which the Court upheld in a 2001 decision. The Sixth Circuit characterized that precedent as “questionable” and noted that recent Supreme Court campaign finance decisions have applied a different approach. Both the Republican challengers and the Trump Administration argue the precedent should be overturned. Oral arguments are scheduled for the October 2025 term.

The conservative supermajority’s corporate deregulatory agenda extends beyond campaign finance. In the 2023–2024 term, the Court issued three 6–3 decisions reshaping administrative law. Loper Bright jettisoned the 40-year-old Chevron deference precedent, which had required courts to defer to agency expertise when interpreting ambiguous statutes. Jarkesy brushed aside long-established precedent allowing agencies to adjudicate enforcement actions in-house. Corner Post made it easier for corporate interests to overturn agency regulations in court by effectively eliminating time limitations for facial challenges to regulations.

History demonstrates clear limits on state defiance of federal court rulings. The Supreme Court held in the 19th century that state legislatures cannot nullify federal court judgments. If states could annul such judgments, the Court wrote, “the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” Key cases including Chisholm v. Georgia, McCulloch v. Maryland, and Ableman v. Booth established that the Supreme Court holds authority to interpret federal law and that states cannot nullify federal legislation. Cooper v. Aaron reinforced this principle during the desegregation battles of the 1950s.

However, federal courts possess limited powers to ensure compliance with their decisions. On rare occasions when controversial rulings inspire defiance, courts may turn to the executive branch for enforcement assistance.

The historical record shows that sustained defiance of Supreme Court, particularly when multiple states defy rulings, typically ends through either political accommodation or federal enforcement action. The nullification crisis of the 1830s and the enforcement of desegregation orders in the 1950s and 1960s both followed this pattern.

A legal strategy recently proposed by the Center for American Progress suggests states might work within constitutional bounds rather than defying the Court. The “Corporate Power Reset” argues that states retain sovereign authority to define what powers they grant to corporations through their chartering authority. Citizens United held that the government may not regulate a corporation’s right to spend money independently in elections. But the Court did not and could not say what a corporation is or must be. That question lies beyond even the Supreme Court’s reach.

A footnote in Citizens United itself acknowledges this distinction. Justice Scalia’s concurrence dismissed the dissent’s claim that common law generally prohibited corporate political spending, writing that even if true, “that would have nothing to do with whether political expenditures that were authorized by a corporation’s charter could constitutionally be suppressed.” The inverse follows logically: when a state withholds that power through the corporate charter, it may treat corporate political spending as unauthorized and void without triggering First Amendment scrutiny. Every corporate speech case before the Supreme Court has involved corporations that had been granted unlimited powers by their chartering states and government efforts to regulate their right to act. No case has addressed whether states must grant political spending powers in the first place.

Montana is testing this approach. Local organizers drafted and submitted a constitutional ballot initiative for voters to consider in 2026. The initiative would amend Montana’s constitution to restrict the powers granted to corporations chartered in the state.

There is also the option of having states place limits on size of contributions, even limiting corporation contributions to $1. States can also implement policies to ban candidates who receive funding from any source besides individual contributions, to be disallowed from having their name printed on ballots, though they of course still have the right to run as write-in candidates.

Public support for campaign finance reform remains strong across party lines. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that 71 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats favor limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns. Surveys conducted in 2017 found that 84 percent of Republicans, 92 percent of Democrats, and 86 percent of independents said reducing the influence of big campaign donors was important or very important.

The distinction between state defiance and state authority over corporate structure represents the central legal question. States attempting to simply ignore or override Citizens United would face the same constitutional barriers that have stopped nullification efforts throughout American history; though that doesn’t make these efforts futile since the stakes are so high. The proposed corporate charter approach relies instead on states exercising their traditional sovereign power to define the entities they create. Whether courts would accept this distinction or find that Citizens United implicitly requires states to grant political spending powers to corporations remains an open question that would ultimately be resolved through a mix of litigation, nullification, and civil disobedience.

If you found this article useful, check out my book “Conservatism: America’s Empathy Disorder,” which explores the psychological and neurological roots of how a political movement can abandon democratic principles in favor of power.

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References

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Campaign Legal Center. (n.d.). How does the Citizens United decision still affect us in 2025? https://campaignlegal.org/update/how-does-citizens-united-decision-still-affect-us-2025

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