Citizens United: A Strategy to Take Dark Money Out of Politics

Episode Notes

Transcript

Tom Moore:

But what they didn’t do, they never did, and no Supreme Court case has ever done, is said that the state, which creates all corporations, that the state must grant that power to spend in politics. The authority to create a corporation, to define it, to redefine it, that’s all state law. And the Supreme Court has basically said for two solid centuries that states have unlimited authority to create, define, redefine, change up, destroy, whatever they want with the corporations. They create them. I put you in this world, I can take you out. That has been the wound for the last 200 years.

Announcer:

Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You’re listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from sunny Southern California. Back in 2010, in the campaign finance case, Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission, SCOTUS ruled in favor of Citizens United, stating that the first amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions. This then opened the door to unlimited political spending by corporations and outside groups, ultimately reshaping our elections. Today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will discuss the Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission decision. We will take a look at the impact of this SCOTUS ruling over 16 years in an election year, how a state’s authority over corporations can take out dark money in politics. And without further ado, we’re joined by Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he focuses on democracy and government reform.

From 2015 to 2023, Tom served as council and then chief staff to Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub of the Federal Election Commission. Tom is currently working on a strategy to sidestep the Citizens United versus FEC ruling through a state’s authority to limit corporation spending in politics. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom Moore:

Thanks very much. Glad to be here. Well,

J. Craig Williams:

Tom, just so that we’re all on the same page, just give us a little bit of background about Citizens United first, and then we can dive into what your solution is.

Tom Moore:

Sure.That was a 2010 case that the Supreme Court decided against the Federal Election Commission that invalidated restrictions against corporate spending. And what the court said was you can’t regulate a corporation’s ability to spend in politics as long as they do it independently. Because in earlier cases, in places like Buckley v. Vallejo, the court had said, “The only reason you can regulate political speech is if it’s against the corruption interest.” And basically the court said in Citizens United that if the spending is independent, it can’t be corrupting as a matter of law and can’t create the appearance of corruption. So basically, if you are regulating political speech of a corporation, you can’t do it if they’re trying to spend independently. That is the actual rule that came out of Citizens United.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, doesn’t that presuppose something that a lot of people have talked about and have questions about, which is, is a corporation a person?

Tom Moore:

It does and it doesn’t. It’s funny. They actually didn’t get into corporate personhood. And it’s funny when you look at the case law, they don’t really ever get into it. And they kind of dodge it and there’s this one case that gets into it, but it’s actually in the headnote and not in the decision. But they actually didn’t say corporations are people. They said that corporations are associations of citizens. And if you’re a bunch of citizens with rights to speak in politics, if you gather together in this kind of corporate form, you don’t lose those rights. And so the corporation can speak on your behalf. But they didn’t actually say, as Mitt Romney’s favorite saying, a famous saying was, “Corporations are people, my friend.” The case did not say that.

J. Craig Williams:

Are Associations of People the kind of freedom of assembly? Where does that come from?

Tom Moore:

That’s the general idea. I mean, what it is, is it’s terrible corporation law, terrible corporate law. The whole point of a corporation is that it is not a human being person, but it is a person of sorts, an artificial person that exists separately from any of these staff or shareholders or directors or anything like that. And it has limited liability. It can be sued. It can own property. It can live forever. It can do all these things. It is separate. It is different from a general partnership is what it kind of evolved out of, but they didn’t really get into any of those aspects of it in the case.

J. Craig Williams:

So you’ve come up with a pretty novel solution. Well, I say novel because it just seems kind of logical.

Tom Moore:

Yeah. One of the questions I get asked all the time is, why didn’t anybody think of this before? And the idea is to look at the … There are a lot of presuppositions in the Citizens United case. Citizens United was a Virginia nonprofit C4 corporation under the federal tax laws that under Virginia law was empowered to do anything a person could do. And the Supreme Court looked at that plaintiff walking in the door and said, “Okay, we’ve got this corporation that’s been empowered by the state of Commonwealth of Virginia to do anything a person can do. ” Well, people can spend in politics. So they’ve got the power to spend in politics. So corporations must have the power to spend in politics. And so if they’ve got the power to do it, then they must have the right to do it. And let’s start our discussion right there and talk about what the state or the federal government can do to infringe that right.

But what they didn’t do, they never did. And no Supreme Court case has ever done is said that the state, which creates all corporations, that the state must grant that power to spend in politics. The authority to create a corporation, to define it, to redefine it, that’s all state law. And the Supreme Court has basically said for two solid centuries that states have unlimited authority to create, define, redefine, change up, destroy whatever they want with the corporations. They create them. “I put you in this world, I can take you out. ” That has been the rule for the last 200 years.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, I can see a loophole around this that you get 49 states that say, sure, corporations aren’t people and therefore they can’t spend any money in politics. But I can see a state like Delaware, which is familiar and favorable to most corporations just saying, “Ha ha, fine. Come and register in Delaware and you can spend all the money you want.

Tom Moore:

” Yeah, that’s true. If you register your corporation in Delaware, you can spend all the money you want in Delaware. Delaware empowers corporations to spend in Delaware or to act in Delaware. And the only way a corporation can act in any other state is if that state empowers them to act in that state as a corporation.

J. Craig Williams:

That’s the registration in each state, right?

Tom Moore:

Exactly. And it’s not just we’re giving you permission to come in. We’re not just giving you a license to come in. We’re actually empowering you to act as a corporation in the state because say the difference between Montana and Delaware. Montana and Delaware are sovereigns. Delaware can’t create anything that has any rights to exist in Montana. It can only create something that has the right to exist in Delaware. If a Delaware corporation wants to operate in Montana, then it has to go in and play by Montana’s rules. And Montana, like almost every other state, has a provision that says almost word for word … I’ll paraphrase it, but it says no out- of-state corporation can exercise any power in this state that a domestic corporation can’t exercise. And usually when states get into trouble on that, it’s when they’re trying to kneecap the out- of-state guys to favor the domestic guys.

But if you’re kneecapping the hometown guys, if you just say like, “Hey, we’re not going to extend the power to spend in politics anymore.” That has the effect of kneecapping the out- of-state guys. So if a state like Montana does that, it’s not only the domestic corporations that don’t have the power to spend in Montana’s politics, it’s also 49 states worth of out of state corporations.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. Well, you’re dragging me back into civil procedure back in law school, right? We’re talking about the Interstate Commerce Commission there.

Tom Moore:

Yep.

J. Craig Williams:

How does that play into it?

Tom Moore:

Well, pretty much as long as you treat everybody equally, you’re fine. There’s the dormant commerce clause, there’s things like that. There’s the internal affairs rule, that kind of thing. Those are all, if you’re trying to extend your state’s power beyond your state’s lines, or if you’re treating the local guys more favorably than the out- of-state guys. And as long as you treat everybody equally, and as long as you’re just talking about what happens in your state, you are clear.

J. Craig Williams:

The milk trucks and the rounded fenders, I remember.

Tom Moore:

Mudflaps.

J. Craig Williams:

Mudflaps. That’s what it was. Right. Yeah. So we’ve only seen citizens united in the last 16 years. How’s our politics changed?

Tom Moore:

I think anybody in America could answer that question. They’ve changed dramatically and much for the worse. It’s not just the Citizens United decision. There’s a separate decision that year, Speech Now versus FEC, which was a DC circuit decision, not Supreme Court, but DC Circuit decision. And that basically said, look, Citizens United said you can’t regulate the expenditures when they’re being spent independently. Speech Now came in and said like, “Oh, no, no, you also can’t regulate the contributions coming in. ” So that’s what created today’s super PACS. And it’s this combination of these nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors, giving money to super PACS that has created the problem we have now, which is super PACs actually do have to disclose their donors, but what happens is if you’re a big dark money group that gives to super PAC, then the only donor’s name that you disclose is the name of the dark money group.

So the combination of those two is what Citizens United and Speech Now have brought us, and that has destroyed any kind of accountability in our politics. The amount of outside spending in major races, in contested races, far outstrips what candidates and parties are spending to actually run for reelection or run for election and support their candidates. And that’s just unheard of. None of that existed before Citizens United.

J. Craig Williams:

What’s your strategy basically for getting all 50 states to get in line on this and move forward?

Tom Moore:

So it’s evolved a little bit. Basically, the thought is we really only need to get one state to get it across the line. And right now, there are two that are contending for the honor, Montana, where it’s been in the works for about a year and a half and Hawaii, with legislation is just chugging through the legislature there. The idea is pass it in one state. Mondana will vote on this most likely November 3rd. November 4th, there’ll be a federal lawsuit, win that lawsuit. And there are good reasons to think that you’d win that lawsuit even with this Supreme Court. And the day the Supreme Court either says, “We can’t flip it or we’re not granting cert or whatever.” That’s the day when state legislators in 49 other states get 500 phone calls a piece saying like, “You need to do this right now.” So that’s basically the strategy.

J. Craig Williams:

At this time, let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back. And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Tom Moore, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. What are the arguments against you?

Tom Moore:

Well, the first one is that it violates citizens tonight. I mean, that’s the thing like what? And in some ways, when I’ve talked to campaign finance law people about this, that’s most of what they come up with because for the last 16 years, any kind of campaign finance regulation that would regulate corporate spending is just walking into a buzz law. Every single attempt has been just cut down. They’ve almost got PTSD about it, and I don’t blame them. I mean, I was part of that and I tried to get around this for years and years too, but those are all regulations. Those are all regulatory cases. And that’s pretty much the only kind of laws and the only kind of cases the court has seen. So that’s one of them. One of them is the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, which says that you can’t condition a government benefit on somebody giving up a right.

And if you’re kind of like blurry your eyes a little bit and look at this, it kind of looks like that a little bit. The classic version of this is like you can’t live in public housing and not vote. And Supreme Court doctrine on unconstitutional conditions is all over the place and it’s not very well set out and they’re kind of all over the place on all kinds of issues. But this one is clearly outside any of the cases that they’ve gone with. And the reason is because you don’t lose anything by buying stock in a corporation that doesn’t have the power to spend in politics. You may not gain everything you could if the state decided to had a different way of doing its corporations, but you don’t lose anything. And that’s key. No human loses any rights to do anything at all if a state changes the way it defines its corporations.

Right,

J. Craig Williams:

Because that association can still associate and spend money.

Tom Moore:

Can

J. Craig Williams:

You stop that?

Tom Moore:

Well,

J. Craig Williams:

It’s- If it’s not a corporation, can it be an association or a partnership? I mean, the play of the game.

Tom Moore:

It can still be a … I mean, so people can still associate in a corporation, but the corporation that they’ve associated in now does not have the power to spend in politics. It’s been

J. Craig Williams:

Defined as a different thing. What about a partnership and what about just a flat association of maybe two or three people?

Tom Moore:

Yeah. So well, a partnership, actually that gets through campaign finance law and so forth, that’s just individuals who are spending. And then some LLCs, they’re either organized as corporations or partnerships. Basically, you get treated as the individual people in a general partnership. If you’re just a couple of people spending money in an election, you’re together and spending … That’s a political committee. That is the legal definition of a political committee. And you need to register with the state or the feds and you need to disclose your donors and your spending and so forth. We have legal avenues for all of this. The move here, and I haven’t really said it clearly here, what the move here in Montana or Hawaii is to change the state law to say like, look, we gave you this general grant of powers that says you can do anything a human can do.

And the Supreme Court said that that included the power to spend on politics. That’s crazy. Obviously nobody meant that a hundred years ago when they put this in our statutes, but fine. All right, Supreme Court, you took this general grant and you interpreted it that way. We’re just going to be super clear about it now that this list of powers we’re giving out to our corporations does not include that. So basically it just … And there’s a way to get to it that is hard for a court to overturn that basically just shortens that list and says like, “This is the list we’re giving you now.”

J. Craig Williams:

Doesn’t that constitute a taking? I mean, you’re taking away a right.

Tom Moore:

You’re not taking away a right. So we’re in power-

J. Craig Williams:

It’s a right that the Supreme Court is granted, right? I mean, isn’t it?

Tom Moore:

And this is really important. This is the key to it. And I appreciate the question. It is a right that a court has granted a corporation that has the power to do it. And you can’t complete rights and powers. And my favorite metaphor of this whole effort is this one. Craig, do you have the power to fly? And I mean, flap your arms and fly.

J. Craig Williams:

No, of course not.

Tom Moore:

No. Our creator did not give us that power. We are not defined as entities that have that power. Birds, bats, deared actuals, they were granted that power by their creator. Now, if the Supreme Court came to you tomorrow and said, “Craig, you have a constitutional right to fly.” Would you go to the roof and give it a shot?

Announcer:

No.

Tom Moore:

No, because regardless of what a court says about your right to do something, if you’re defined as an entity that doesn’t have the power to do it, the capacity to do it, it doesn’t change that reality. Without the power to do something, the right doesn’t have anything to attach to. It just doesn’t mean it. It’s meaningless without the power. Same thing for corporations. If a state defines its corporations as entities that do not have the power to do this, then regardless of what a court says about the right to do it, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the underlying reality that they don’t. And there’s a part of this that I haven’t … There’s several little pieces that are already sitting in state laws that’s key here. And one of them is that there is a section in every state’s law that says, “We have the power to change up your powers at any time.

We can modify them. We can get rid of you altogether.” And the Supreme Court has said for 150 years on this, that means that they can do it for good reasons, bad reasons, no reasons. It doesn’t matter who it hurts. And every corporation that exists is on notice that this could happen at any time. So if a state does change up your powers, you don’t have the right to complain about it because you are on notice. That was part of your charter was that the state could change this up at any time. So that’s why the state can take away this power, you no longer grant this power, and it doesn’t take away the right, it makes the right irrelevant.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. I probably know the answer to this question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. What about the supremacy clause? How does that play into it?

Tom Moore:

It doesn’t because there’s no federal law of corporations.What the Supreme Court has said over and over again is that this creation of corporations, general business corporations, is a matter of state law. There’s nothing firmer in corporation law than is the state’s business. But actually I’ll give you, there’s an interesting exception to that, which are national banks. In the 1800s, when corporations were just getting rolling, you had to go to the legislature of your state and get a special bill, a private bill passed by the legislature that would create your corporation and hand you a charter. And when they did that, they had an enumerated list of powers. You can do these five things, you can be a railroad company, you can last 20 years and so forth. And that’s it. And there was no general like, “Hey, and anything a person can do. ” There’s none of that.

So throughout the 1800s, this is the way corporations were created. And in the 1860s, Congress passed these national banking acts that created the national banks. Whenever you see something that says the first National Bank of Boston or anything that has national in the bank title, you’re talking about a national bank. There’s about a thousand of them. Those laws created, they have an enumerated list of powers like every list of powers was in the 1800s and they’ve got a little bit of a catchall that says or anything incidental to banking. And that list of powers has never, ever been construed to include election spending. So if the question is, can an American government create corporations that don’t have the power to spend in elections? We know that the answer is yes, because we’ve been doing it since the 1860s. And if the federal government can do it for bank corporations, which have stockholders and they’re regular corporations, they just happen to be about banking, then states constitutionally, there’s no difference between that and a state doing it with general business corporations.

J. Craig Williams:

All right. So let’s assume your law passes in Hawaii, Montana, and then spreads like wildfire to the other 48 states and passes the Supreme Court challenge. Now I’m Mr. Big Money sitting in the corporation headquarters in some big state somewhere and I’ve got the best general counsel I can hire and a team of lawyers. Where am I going to look for loopholes in your theories?

Tom Moore:

You’re not going to find many because, let’s put it this way, you’re not going to find many and your hunt to find them is not going to be helped by your lawyers or especially your insurers because this is not … When you shorten the list of powers of a corporation, that’s a very different thing that you’ve done to a corporation. And all of a sudden there’s this area up here where it’s not actually illegal for them to spend in politics. It’s just beyond the powers of the corporation. And this is not a doctrine we’ve dealt with much in the last hundred years, but if a corporation acts beyond its powers, ultra VRES-

J. Craig Williams:

It can be disassembled.

Tom Moore:

Yeah. The attorney general can yank your charter. Your shareholders can go personally after directors and officers. I mean, it is a corporate death penalty. So basically your in- house counsel and your insurers especially are going to say, “Find some other thing to think about. ” Take your personal funds.

J. Craig Williams:

Do you need to make it a crime?

Tom Moore:

Nope, no. In fact, you can’t because that gets back to the regulatory side. If you were to ban any of this, then you’re on the regulatory side, you’re in Citizens United World, you’re in Baladi world, you’re in …

J. Craig Williams:

You’re in the administrative side of law, right? Yeah.

Tom Moore:

Well, this kind of subtractive regulatory authority of legislatures. None of this affects people, right? Corporations get all their powers from the state. People are born with all their powers. We don’t get powers from the government in a democracy. We give power to the government in a democracy. So people are born here. Corporations are put here by state law. And then regulations, when you’re exercising regulatory authority, you’re like chipping away at that. You can do anything you want. Okay, fine. Don’t murder people. Don’t drive 150 miles an hour in a school zone. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. This is an entirely separate power, this positive, discretionary creation power of the state where we’re not regulating anything. We’re not taking anything. We’re deciding what to build. And the First Amendment says you can’t regulate the right, you can’t infringe the right to speak, but that’s on this regulatory side.

This First Amendment does not say that you must create speakers. That would be a very different thing.

J. Craig Williams:

Let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back. And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m back with Tom Moore, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. So the idea is let’s walk through the halls of Congress here for a moment. Certainly there’s been a lot of complaints from the citizens about Citizens United. So why hasn’t Congress, other than the fact that it doesn’t have a spying lately, why isn’t Congress doing something about this?

Tom Moore:

Well, put it this way. The reason it’s going to work is because Congress isn’t involved in this at all. The federal government doesn’t have any authority over state creation and redefinition of corporations at all.

J. Craig Williams:

I’m talking about why didn’t they overturn Citizens United? I mean, they have that power.

Tom Moore:

Yeah. No, they don’t. Because if the Supreme Court says that a statute means a certain thing, then Congress can write a different statute and you get a different result. But when the Supreme Court makes a constitutional decision, like it is unconstitutional to regulate the right of corporations to spend independently, you cannot overturn that with the Congressional Act. You can overturn it with a constitutional amendment, a federal constitutional amendment, but you can’t just pass a statute that overturns that.

J. Craig Williams:

Marbury versus Madison drag us all the way back into the beginning of civil procedure here.

Tom Moore:

All the way back.

J. Craig Williams:

And really, is this just a procedural move? I mean, is this what it’s going to take to get rid of dark money in politics?

Tom Moore:

This will get rid of dark money in politics. All dark money in politics is being spent by 501 four, five, six corporations and LLCs and so forth, but this takes care of all of that. One way to think about this is in the 19th century when states were creating corporations and started to give them more and more and more, people were terrified that corporations would get too big and would control too much capital and too much land and too much power and could express that politically.That was a fear that ran all the way through the 19th century. So they built these clauses in the law that says, no, no, no, no, no. Whatever the legislature puts out there, you can bring it back. You can redefine it, you can destroy it, whatever you want. We’re not going to just set Frankenstein’s monster out there to wreck our politics or wreck our country.

You can always take that back. And this is the clause that is being used here. And so it’s nothing new really. It’s basically just kind of like cashing in a gift certificate that 19th century legislators put there for us.

J. Craig Williams:

Has the Center for American Progress thought about what it wants the politics to look like in the next 10 years after this is over with?

Tom Moore:

Well, so what this will look like is every cent spent in politics will come from an individual and every cent of that will be disclosed. This by itself is not a perfect solution. It’s not the whole solution. If Elon Musk wants to spend $250 million and send it to a super PAC and disclose his name, then he can still do that. What he can’t do, which apparently he’s been doing, is hide it, is launder that money through dark money C4s. You will not have Americans for better tomorrow, tomorrow, getting money anonymously and disclosing no donors. So if we have a system where all the money’s from individuals and all the money’s disclosed, that’ll be far, far better than what we have now.

J. Craig Williams:

Do we currently have any laws in place that would have handled or could have addressed the issue that Citizens United created in terms of the amount of money that gets ingested into politics such as like the Sherman Act monopolies? Is there any kind of RICO application here to … Can we do anything apart from your method, could we attack it with existing laws?

Tom Moore:

So there’s the other half of it, right? So this reform, the CAPS corporate power reset would get dark money and corporate money out, but it doesn’t stop the $250 million check from Elon Musk going to the Super PAC. That can be attacked. Harvard Law Professor Larry Lesig had organized a ballot issue in Maine that passed that basically said, “We’re going to regulate super PACs the way we regulate regular PACS.” That Speech Now case that I mentioned earlier, that the DC Circuit decided in every other circuit in the country, except the First Circuit, has signed onto it. So it’s a question of first impression for the First Circuit and it’s before it went to a district court, it’s before the First Circuit right now. And basically it would be main saying, “Look, instead of having unlimited contributions coming into a Super PAC that can spend independently an unlimited amount, we’re going to regulate it to $5,000 that can go in from any one person.” That, along with the corporate power reset, would fix things fairly dramatically.

That would fix the problem. I mean, Elon Musk could give $5,000 that Super PAC. Okay, fine, so could I.

The two sides of that would actually fix our problems altogether. Congress can also pass a law that does that. Congress has never tried that. That has not been tested. None of that. The unlimited contributions going into Super PACS, that has not been tested at the Supreme Court. It stayed at the circuit court level and it’s hit every circuit except the First Circuit. But that is a piece that Congress can go after. And I think if the corporate power reset moves and we take care of half the problem, I think it’ll be a tremendous amount of pressure on Congress to fix the rest of it.

J. Craig Williams:

That raises the question then kind of a more of a basic question, I think. What’s the difference between a PAC, a super PAC, and a corporation put PACS on one side and corporations on the other? Is this one of those loopholes that they’re going to find and work around you?

Tom Moore:

No. So they’re all political committees and political committees were set up in the post-Watergate era as like, okay, this is an entity that you got to have a treasurer, you got to register with your state or the Feds, and you got to disclose everything. And money goes in, money goes out. If you’re a candidate running for office, you can’t just take a $5,000 check from some … You can’t take $5,000 in cash from somebody and pay $5,000 to a vendor. It has to go through your bank account, get registered, and the money has to be recorded going in, the money has to be recorded going out. That’s what political committees are. And so either you’re a candidate committee and so that’s money’s coming in and out so you can run for office or you’re a party committee and you’re the Maryland Democratic Party and you’re raising and spending money that way, or you’re a political action committee, a PAC that say you’re General Motors and you can’t spend directly in politics.

You can spend independently, but not directly. So you’ve got this PAC that you have associated with General Motors that can spend directly in politics. A regular PAC can just give money directly to a candidate. A super PAC cannot, but General Motors can’t give money to that PAC, but everybody who works at General Motors who are a certain level of seniority can. So that’s how the PAC would raise money. Super PACs were created by this Speech Now decision and they are like the FEC defined them, they were IE OPCs, independent expenditure only political committees. So they can’t ever give directly to a candidate. They can only do independent expenditures. And that’s why corporations can give to them.

J. Craig Williams:

There seems, at least to me, and maybe this is just the cynical aspect of it, that money finds its way into politics no matter what. And I know that this question doesn’t really relate to elections, but it seems to me that a congressman goes in or a Congresswoman goes into Congress owning a house and they come out owning four or five houses, a mansion, and a whole bunch of things in a nice portfolio of millions of dollars. How does that happen? Well,

Tom Moore:

It’s a different ball of wax. And the Center for American Progress is working on that as well. But there are things like members of Congress are allowed to trade individual stocks. That’s a problem. They have a tremendous amount of inside knowledge about what’s coming next in this country that they should not be able to trade on. They can do book contracts. They can do all kinds of things. Congress is not the bravest institution in the world when it comes to regulating the conduct of its own members. They’ll be perfectly happy to tell a school district 18,000 different things they have to do, but they don’t pass a lot of rules for themselves. But those are ethics rules. Those are not campaign finance rules. The problem right now is not what’s … The scandal is not all the law breaking that’s going on with campaign finance.

The scandal is what’s legal. And you So if we make a lot of this just something that corporations can’t do, something that Super PACS can’t do, and money may find a way of getting into politics, but money will not be finding legal ways to get into politics. And when money gets into politics illegally, which it does sometimes, then people go to jail. And that should stop people from just dumping money in illegally.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Tom, we’ve just about reached the end of our program. It’s time to wrap up and get your final thoughts as well as your contact information so our listeners can reach out to you, support your efforts, or complain to you about what you’re doing. So can you wrap up for us, please?

Tom Moore:

Thank you for this. These are great questions. One of the great things about working on this project is that it is giving people some hope, some agency. We’ve been told for 16 years that you can only pass a federal constitutional amendment or wait for a new Supreme Court to be appointed to get rid of Citizens United. And it turns out that’s just not the case. We have the power in our individual legislatures, in our individual states to change this up. And at the end of the day, corporations don’t work for their shareholders. They work for us because we create them. And that’s a very powerful thought. And it has actually given a lot of people hope, as I’ve explained it to them across the country over the last year. And that’s pretty cool. In terms of contact information, the place everybody should go is montanaplan.com.

That is the statutory ballot issue that is moving in Montana, which is great. They’re collecting signatures right now. They got to get them by June, then fight to get it won in November. But tons of information about this there. And transparentelection.org. That is the group that is running that effort. And a very close friend is running it there. He’s doing an amazing job, Jeff Mangan. It’s the transparent election initiative. And they’ve got all kinds of information, background information on this and what you could do to get this moving in your state.

J. Craig Williams:

Thank you very much. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today.

Tom Moore:

Ah, thanks so much. Take care.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, here are a few of my thoughts about today’s topic. I think Tom’s exactly right. This is a really backdoor method so far that nobody’s thought of. And it seems like it’s going to work. Tom’s explained all of the processes and all the challenges and get behind it, support it, and let’s get rid of dark money and politics so that your voice can be heard as equally as mine. Well, that’s it for my rant on today’s topic. Let me know what you think. If you like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us at legaltalknetwork.com where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

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