The Montana Plan stops corporations from buying elections
Most Americans have never warmed up to Citizens United, which permits corporations to donate to election campaigns; some polls have shown as many as 75 percent oppose it.
Here's a piece from 25 October 2025 in The American Prospect on The Montana Plan:
Harold Meyerson
From the piece:
Most Americans have never warmed up to Citizens United, which permits corporations to donate to election campaigns; some polls have shown as many as 75 percent oppose it. But it’s Montanans who are now putting forth an ingenious ballot measure that, while it wouldn’t legally overturn that ruling (the Roberts Court would never consider such a thing), would negate its consequences nonetheless. Dubbing their proposal the Transparent Election Initiative, they’ve begun work to present state voters in November 2026 with a proposal that wouldn’t affect corporations’ rights—which Citizens United extended to buying elections—but rather their powers, which are created exclusively by the individual states.
To make his case, Moore cites an entire library of Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1819’s Dartmouth v. Woodward. In that landmark ruling, which stands to this day, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote:
A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence … The objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote. They are deemed beneficial to the country; and this benefit constitutes the consideration, and, in most cases, the sole consideration of the grant.
Unlike humans endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, corporations have zero powers, Moore notes, until state governments confer those powers upon them. He also cites recent Court rulings restating the unchallenged principle that it’s the states, not the federal government, that have the authority to grant corporations their powers.
Over the centuries, states have competed with each other to vest corporations with expansive powers, but their power to limit as well as define those powers has remained constant, though infrequently invoked. Indeed, in his ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, which enabled corporations to avoid providing health insurance covering contraception to their employees on religious grounds, none other than Samuel Alito wrote that “the objectives that may properly be pursued by the companies in these cases are governed by the laws of the States in which they were incorporated.”
Moore documents that states have frequently amended their charter laws to withdraw specific powers from their corporations. Texas in 1876 stripped the power from banks to issue bills of credit, for instance, or New Jersey in 1913 limited the power and scope of holding companies.
But doesn’t changing one state’s law on corporate powers just amount to a game of whack-a-mole? Since more corporations are chartered in Delaware than any other state, what good would it do for Montana to change its law if Delaware doesn’t?
In fact, a whole lot of good. Moore cites an 1869 Supreme Court ruling saying that “foreign corporations”—which in this context means corporations chartered in other states, not in other nations—must comport with the corporate charter law of every state in which they do business. If Montana enacts the ballot measure in 2026 that forbids the corporations it charters from campaign spending, that law would also require corporations chartered in Delaware or any other state to abide by the Montana law’s provisions on powers granted and powers withheld when it did business—or tried to influence an election—in Montana.
Moore runs through a host of arguments against his case, relying on the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment—which reserves powers not stipulated in the U.S. Constitution (such as the power to charter corporations) to the states—and on the distinction between powers (which in this case are the creation of state governments) and rights (which was the subject of the Court’s ruling in Citizens United).
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tty next time,
