Author’s Note: This is one of four pieces on how American politics ran representative government through a donor pipeline and decided “independent” means the candidate can headline the fundraiser while somebody else asks for the unlimited check. We’ll cover how we got here, how the machine works, what Washington calls corruption, and what might actually fix it, because public contempt apparently isn’t a binding form of oversight.
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If you’ve spent more than eleven minutes discussing money in American politics, someone has probably explained Citizens United to you.
The story usually goes like this: In 2010, the Supreme Court declared corporations were people, decided money was speech, sold democracy to Exxon, and installed a debit-card reader on the Capitol dome.
It’s a terrific story but most of its wrong.
Corporate legal existence was already old enough to complain about the music by the time Citizens United showed up.
In Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall described a corporation as an “artificial being” existing in contemplation of law. He discussed precisely why such entities matter: they can hold property, manage affairs and continue functioning despite changes in the human beings composing them.
This wasn’t the Supreme Court discovering that textile mills experience loneliness. It was law figuring out how an organization survives Gerald from accounting.
Then came Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, the case routinely dragged onto social media whenever somebody needs to explain 140 years of constitutional law before the appetizers arrive.
Before oral argument, Chief Justice Morrison Waite announced, as recorded in the official U.S. Reports, that the Court didn’t need argument over whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause applied to the railroad corporations because the justices already agreed that it did.
The written opinion ultimately resolved the case without deciding that constitutional question. So yes, Santa Clara was enormously important in the development of corporate constitutional protections. No, nine justices didn’t gather around a railroad, sprinkle it with holy water and announce that Southern Pacific had developed a soul.
Then history committed an act of terrible inconvenience.
In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called for legislation forbidding corporations from contributing money for political purposes. Two years later, Congress passed the Tillman Act of 1907, prohibiting corporate monetary contributions in federal elections.
Apparently there was once a period when politicians could discuss concentrated financial influence without immediately naming a fundraising committee after it. And here is the part that should ruin at least three Facebook arguments this week.
As of September 7, 2026, corporations still cannot use treasury funds to make contributions directly to federal candidates. That prohibition exists today. Citizens United didn’t legalize unlimited corporate contributions to candidate campaigns. It did something different.
The groundwork had been laid in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. The Supreme Court drew a crucial distinction between money contributed directly to candidates and money spent independently advocating their election or defeat. Contribution limits remained because large direct contributions raised corruption concerns. Consequently, Independent political expenditures received much stronger First Amendment protection.
Then Citizens United came along in January 2010. The Supreme Court struck the prohibition on corporations using treasury funds for independent political expenditures and electioneering communications. Importantly, the Court didn’t strike the prohibition on corporate contributions directly to candidates.
The decision directly concerned corporate spending. Because federal law imposed parallel restrictions on corporations and labor organizations, the Federal Election Commission subsequently stopped enforcing those independent-spending restrictions against labor organizations as well.
But that still wasn’t quite the Super PAC. America needed another case.
Two months later, the D.C. Circuit decided SpeechNow.org v. FEC. That case involved individuals contributing to an organization devoted exclusively to independent expenditures.
The court reasoned that if independent expenditures don’t create the kind of quid pro quo corruption that justifies contribution limits, government can’t limit how much individuals contribute to an organization whose only purpose is financing those expenditures.
Now comes the part that actually built the machine.
In FEC Advisory Opinion 2010-11, the Commission explicitly combined the holdings of Citizens United and SpeechNow. It concluded that independent-expenditure-only committees could accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, labor organizations and political committees.
Congratulations. You have assembled a Super PAC. It was Washington’s greatest engineering achievement since attaching a tollbooth to representative government.
As of September 7, 2026, Super PACs may generally accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, labor organizations and other political committees, subject to federal prohibited-source rules.
Those prohibited sources include foreign nationals and federal contractors, among others, because even campaign-finance law occasionally encounters a guardrail. The history lesson was important because bad diagnoses produce useless cures.
Suppose tomorrow America declared that corporations possessed no political rights whatsoever. The billionaire remains… and irritatingly biological.
A wealthy individual could still spend enormous sums independently supporting candidates. Other associations would raise their own constitutional questions. Meanwhile, eliminating corporate legal personality wholesale would cause spectacular problems involving property, contracts, lawsuits and virtually every other reason corporations exist as legal entities.
The better question isn’t whether General Motors deserves a birthday cake. It’s how much private economic power any person or organization should be able to convert into electoral power.
That’s not as easy as shouting “corporations aren’t people.” It’s also the question we actually have to answer.
There are reforms available without pretending two centuries of law never happened. Major political funding can be made far more transparent so voters can identify who truly finances elections. Candidates can be given viable public-financing and small-donor alternatives to dependence on extraordinarily wealthy patrons. Rules surrounding supposedly independent political operations can demand something closer to genuine independence.
And if Americans ultimately decide that reasonable limits on massive independent election spending should be constitutionally permissible, then address that constitutional question directly. Declaring corporations “not people” doesn’t solve the problem when the billionaire writing the $100 million check is, inconveniently, still a person.
The history is messier than the meme and, unfortunately, so is the solution.
Tammy’s Suggested Reading for Anyone Currently Typing an Angry Correction
Constitutional law remains stubbornly resistant to slogans, so here are the documents responsible for ruining everybody’s easier explanation.
- Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Supreme Court, 1819
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17/518 - Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, official U.S. Reports, 1886
https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep118394/ - Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 Annual Message to Congress, U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1905/message-of-the-president - Federal Election Commission history of federal campaign-finance law and the Tillman Act
https://www.fec.gov/about/mission-and-history/ - Buckley v. Valeo, Supreme Court, 1976
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/424/1 - Federal Election Commission summary of Citizens United v. FEC
https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/ - Federal Election Commission statement on Citizens United and labor organizations
https://www.fec.gov/updates/commission-statement-on-citizens-united-v-fec/ - Federal Election Commission summary of SpeechNow.org v. FEC
https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/speechnoworg-v-fec/ - Federal Election Commission Advisory Opinion 2010-11 on independent-expenditure-only committees
https://www.fec.gov/updates/ao-2010-11-contributions-to-an-independent-expenditure-committee/ - Federal Election Commission guidance on prohibited candidate contributions
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/who-can-and-cant-contribute/ - Federal Election Commission guidance on contributions to Super PACs
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/taking-receipts-pac/contributions-to-super-pacs-and-hybrid-pacs/
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Tammy Pondsmith writes because campaign-finance law is a 200-year user agreement nobody reads, nobody understands, and somehow the richest people keep finding the premium features.
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