This week’s video is important. It shows a clear path to getting rid of the Supreme Court’s horrific 2010 decision Citizens United vs. Federal Election Committee.

That decision opened the floodgates to campaign spending by giant corporations. The high court reasoned that corporations are people who have First Amendment rights to free speech, and that corporate spending on elections is a form of free speech. But the Supreme Court never got to the more fundamental question of corporate power, because since the early twentieth century states haven’t limited corporate powers to do much of anything.

Yet corporations are creatures of state law. States create and define corporations. Whatever powers corporations have come from state decisions to grant them those powers. This principle is embodied in an 1819 opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall declaring that a corporation “possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that states began to give corporations all the powers human beings have. But states don’t have to do that. States can decide to give them the powers they need to do their business, but not the power to spend money on elections.

This isn’t about corporate rights. It’s about the more basic question of corporate powers. If a corporation doesn’t have the power to do something in the first place, it obviously doesn’t have any right to do it. Without the power to do it, a corporation cannot do it. The state hasn’t empowered it to do it.

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