from Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast, June 1, 2026
Molly Jong-Fast (33:40):
Tom Moore is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Welcome, Welcome, Tom.
Tom Moore:
Thanks, Molly, glad to be here.
MJF:
So excited to have you, and let’s talk about what’s happening in Hawai. I mean unbelievable stuff.
TM:
Yeah. Governor Josh Green signs the bill into law that will disempower corporations operating in Hawaii.
MJF:
Basically, Citizens United is ruining our world, and our Supreme Court is very Trumpy, very corporate. The only thing they love more than Donald Trump is corporations. Now, there’s a sort of work around here, and this is a plan that you came up with. So talk us through this plan that you came up with. What’s it called? What’s the work around? And also, more importantly, how did you come up with that?
TM:
So this is a way of using tools that have been sitting in states’ corporation laws for more than a century to get at Citizens United, the problem of Citizens United. Basically, states create corporations. They give them all their powers, the power to own property, the power to sign contracts. And about one hundred years ago, all the states gave all the corporations, all the time, all the power to do anything legal or anything that a human could do.
And it just kind of sat there for the last one hundred years, and then we get these cases like Citizens United, where the Court said, like, well, they’ve got this power to everything a human can do, so they must have the power to spending elections like humans, and let’s talk about their right to do it. And the kind of fatal assumption that they made was that these states were always going to give their corporations this power.
But there’s this whole separate line of cases that’s two hundred years long that says that states can change up these powers at any time. And then all corporations actually have baked into their charters the idea that states can change up any of it or get rid of them all together at any time. And the Supreme Court they’re not corporate law experts, and they actually kind of mangled a lot of corporate law in their Citizens United decision.
But what they assumed was this idea that the states would never, ever, ever change it, although there are all these cases that say that they can, and now Hawaii has and that’s a huge deal.
MJF:
Explain what that means. How they do that.
TM:
It’s an incredibly simple move. It just says like, hey, instead of having all the powers to do everything legal, that you know, everything that a human can do, we’re gonna give you all the powers you need to run your business, except the power to spend in politics. We’re just not going to grant you that power anymore. And without the power to do it, they’ve redefined their corporations as entities that don’t have the capacity to do it.
Without the power to do it, the right to do it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing for that right to attach to. That right attached to corporations that had the power. And if you’re talking to a corporation that doesn’t have the power, the rights discussion doesn’t even touch that corporation.
MJF:
We got to get an example here. You are a corporation, you’re giving money to a candidate. This would affect people running for office in Hawaii, it wouldn’t necessarily affect federal candidates, would it?
TM:
So here’s the thing. This is weird because this is something that state law doesn’t usually do. Usually the thought is like, okay, for federal candidates ,House, Senate, presidency, Congress has occupied the field. They’ve got the federal Election Campaign Act. You know that rules everything. States can’t do anything about that. But this is coming out of from the other direction. It’s not regulation of any of that. States can’t do that.
But corporations get all of their powers from the state. They get the power to spend in local elections from the state, to get their power to spend state elections from the state. They get their power to spend in federal elections from the state. So if the state of Hawaii is saying, hey, corporations, if you’re chartered by us, if you’re operating as a corporation in our state from anywhere else, we’re not giving you that power at all to spend. And so it knocks them out of federal races as well, not just state and local races.
MJF:
But you have to be incorporated in the state of Hawaii. So if you’re a corporation, now all right, keep going.
TM:
No. There’s another part that’s already in Hawaii law and in every state’s law that says no out of state corporation can exercise any power in this state that a domestic corporation can’t exercise. And usually with state’s get in trouble with that, it’s because they knee-capped the local guys. They knee-cap the out of state guys to help the local guys and in this case, what Hawaii’s done is they’ve knee-capped the local guys and they dragged down the out of state guys to the same level, so nobody has the power to spend in politics. They disempowered the corporate form from spending in politics in Hawaii, no matter where that corporation is created.
MJF:
So what does this mean like for the next election cycle.
TM:
It means that people have some hope that this can change. In Hawaii. It means their elections are going to change January first, 2027, that’s the effective date of that. It’s a little close to the 2026 election to throw any of these things in. Montana’s got a similar ballot initiative rolling that is, that’s got work to do, but it is rolling toward toward passage that would go to effect January first, 2027.
What it means is there’s going to be a huge court case and it’s probably going to go to the Supreme Court, and plenty of reasons why it’ll win . . .
MJF:
. . . because there’s precedent.
TM:
There’s precedent, but so there’s there’s kind of like three levels to this. People who talk a lot about campaign finance law and election law just say like, oh no, they’re just gonna flip it. They don’t care what the law is, they’re just gonna flip it. And it’s like, okay, well, yes, they totally could flip it. That’s within their power. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is because we’re in this power granting realm rather than regulatory realm.
You know, we’re not taking anything away from anybody, we’re giving to these corporations. Courts don’t have a lot of tools in that toolbox, and it’s a totally different set of tools that they would use to strike down a regulation. So the remedies they have are very, very limited, and they set off all kinds of rotten consequences.
Part of Hawaii’s constitution says we could never, ever send anything out, any kind of privilege out that we can’t take back. And if the court flips that, if the Supreme Court flipped that, they will be telling Hawaii like, well that you can’t create that kind of corporation where you can take everything back. It would actually could get Hawaii out of the corporate creation business altogether.
And 24 other states have constitutional provisions just like that, and it would get them out as well. So I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it’s a warning to the Supreme Court that flipping this is not as easy as flipping a regulation. It is a can of words you don’t want to open.
MJF:
So could we end up going back to just normal campaign giving?
TM:
Yeah? Yeah, And I think the day that the Supreme Court either decides that they can’t stomach the consequences, or if they decided the two hundred years of corporate law precedent is actually correct and that this is a matter of state authority and states can set up corporations however they want, which has been the law for two hundred years, they might just go for that. Then that will be
the day.
The day the Court makes that decision, that’ll be the day that I think this starts moving in every state. We actually had bills moving in 15 states this year, including Hawaii, and you know, first year out, weird new concept, nobody’s ever seen anything like it. It didn’t get very far in most of those states. Hawaii was the very welcome exception, a very pleasant surprise. But next year, I expect, you know, probably double that.
You know, we’ll have bills going all over the country. And sometimes, you know, they’ll sit there and they won’t get through. But that bill is sitting on the shelf, and if there’s a big moment, like the Supreme Court says this is okay, that’s when those bills will be pulled off the shelf. So I think this could roll very quickly at that moment.
MJF:
So if it happened, what do you think our campaign finance will look like?
TM:
When this passes, basically all the money in that state’s politics, federal, state, local, ballot issues, every dollar, every dollar comes from a human being, every dollar is disclosed, and every dollar is voluntary. And that’s a huge deal. That is so much better than what we have now.
The one big thing it does not handle, because it’s not corporate related, it’s individual spending, is Elon Musk wants to cut a 250 million dollar check to a superpac, he’s going to be able to do that. Harvard law professor Larry Lessig is working on that online angle in the first circuit. God speed to him on that.
But what this will do, what my approach will do, what CAP’s (Center for American Progress’) approach will do is stop Musk from doing it dark, from routing it through a dark money group, laundering that money, and making sure that nobody can see who the money came from, which, to be clear, he wrote a lot of, he wrote a huge check to, in 2024, to help Trump get elected, and he put his name to that, but he also had a bunch of money running through LLC’s in Texas.
The New York Times did a good story on this that was totally dark, that nobody knew about, and we don’t really know how much money was spent that way. This would cut all of that out, and it matters to the voters if they can see, like, okay, this horrible super pac ad: I can see that it’s being, was paid for by Elon Musk. That makes a difference to the voters, that is helpful to voters.
MJF:
Right, and we saw that in the Wisconsin judiciary that people don’t love an Elon Musk-backed candidate. So in Delaware there’s this, can you talk about this, corporations voting?
TM:
Yeah, there’s a weird situation. A weird case came out of Fenwick Island, Delaware this week. And I’m not fully converse in all the details, so I may get some this wrong. But the judge there ruled that corporations can vote, and everyone’s like “woop,” like it’s kind of like the next step of Citizens United that everyone’s kind of afraid of. There’s some weird circumstances there.
Apparently in Fenwick Island, a lot of the properties are owned by people who have put their property into trusts, and so either the people can vote or the trust can vote, but not both. It’s kind of an odd circumstance, but it shows that it’s the kind of thing that if the citizens of Delaware so like, wait a minute, we don’t want that, they could decide through their legislature to no longer empower corporations in the state of Delaware to vote in elections.
I mean they they could just say, like, we don’t let corporations chartered here or operating here, don’t do that. You know, this is something that, what’s kind of cool about this approach, is that it kind of reconfigures the whole relationship between people and corporations. It’s like, look, they don’t work for their shareholders.
Corporations do not work for their shareholders. They work for us because we create them, and we say what they are, and we say what powers they have through our legislatures, and if they’re doing something we don’t like, like wrecking our politics by spending unlimited amounts of money independently, we can take that power back, like we don’t need to, we don’t need to create a monster that’s going to destroy us.
But that’s not the way people have thought about corporations really for the last hundred years, which is kind of cool.
MJF:
Oh wow, and that is incredible. So you think that this step of focusing on the corporations will lead us to better election reform.
TM:
Yeah, it’s given a lot of folks some hope and some feeling that they have agency in their democracy, which for 16 years of Citizens United that we were really denied. I mean, I was like, that is a fortress. It is impregnable. There’s no way around it. Just suck it up and enjoy all the super pac ads because you can’t do anything about it. You can try for a federal constitutional amendment, good luck with that. You can wait for a new Supreme Court, good luck with that. And that was it.
I mean, that was that’s the way I felt for most of these years. But now there’s this way where people in each state can rise up and change their laws and no longer empower these corporations to do these things. And I think what that will do is this hope and this agency that it gives people will give them hope an agency to try other things as well. You know, whether it’s yeah, I mean there’s, there’s a ton of great, great election reforms out there that really would make a difference just on the way elections are actually run, and I think this will fuel all of that.
MJF:
It sounds like it will. It’s like an interesting way to sort of pull back and get into it in a totally different way.
TM:
Yeah. I get hassled about this sometimes. It’s like, if it’s so simple, why didn’t anybody think of it before? And it’s like, I don’t know. It only took me ten years to get to it. But it’s basically, you’ve got, you’ve got corporate law folks and election law folks, and they don’t seem to talk to each other very much. When I brought this to corporate law folks, they’re like, oh yeah, that, yep, 100 percent, makes total sense, which the election law people are not there yet.
MJF:
If you go down this path with election, corporations, law, like, where else can this go?
TM:
Yeah, so this is this is something that I’ve not run down all the possibilities on because I’m laser focused on getting this political spending power.
MJF:
Yeah, for sure.
TM:
But think about any thing that corporations are doing that you don’t like, if it can be reduced to a power that the state is giving them, like maybe you just don’t give that power anymore. And it could be a matter of the power to externalize your environmental costs, the power to misuse your customer’s data.
There are all kinds of things like that, and in some ways all of those are less fraught than you know, political spending, which has all these First Amendment things tied up in it. A lot of these others do not. But throughout the 19th century, everyone was totally afraid of corporate power because they afraid that they would gain too much power, gain too much money, gain too much influence, buy too much property, all these things. And they were right.
And you know, we’ve spent the last one hundred years kind of learning that lesson. Maybe we need to pull out the tools that have been sitting in the law since the 1800s and kind of reel some of that back and say, like, you know, actually, no, you cannot just do with us whatever you want.
MJF:
You can’t do with us whatever you want. Tom Moore, thank you, Thank you. What a cool thing to have the creator of this great idea on this podcast talking about how it could work.
Addressing Questions Surrounding Hawaii’s Bold Move To Undo Citizens United, Tom Moore, Center for American Progress, Apr 29, 2026
Hawaii is poised to become the first state to use its long-dormant legal authority to drain corporate money from its elections—and the legal questions raised about the move have clean answers.