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us supreme court
‘Big News’: Hawaii Targets Citizens United With Law Clarifying Corporations Are Not People
"The far-right Supreme Court hijacked the Constitution to let corporations spend in our elections. But we are not powerless. We can fight back," said US Rep. Greg Casar.
May 15, 2026
The state of Hawaii has passed a law that poses a direct challenge to the infamous 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which opened the door to unlimited corporate spending in US elections.
Democratic Hawaii Gov. Josh Green on Thursday signed into law a bill that takes aim at the court's ruling that corporations are effectively people with full free speech rights who can face no limits on what they can contribute to political organizations.
As explained by More Perfect Union, the law, which is set to take effect next July, classifies corporations as "artificial persons" who do not have a constitutional right to make political donations.
"The bill could limit the influence of super PACs," noted More Perfect Union, "and be a model to challenge the influence of money in politics."
Democratic Hawaii state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, a supporter of the law, said on Thursday he was proud that Hawaii has become "the first state in the nation" to take direct action challenging Citizens United.
"As elected leaders, we do not serve artificial entities," Keohokalole said. "We serve the people."
“We do not serve artificial entities. We serve the people.” @SenatorJarrett on Hawaii making history by getting dark and corporate money out of politics. #CitizensUnited pic.twitter.com/Se6HQyvRu8
— American Progress (@amprog) May 14, 2026
US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, hailed the law as "big news" that should inspire opponents of limitless corporate political spending across the US.
"The far-right Supreme Court hijacked the Constitution to let corporations spend in our elections," said Casar. "But we are not powerless. We can fight back."
The new law passed despite opposition from Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez, who argued that defending it in court could be difficult and expensive.
The law's passage earned praise from campaign finance watchdogs who have long called for overturning Citizens United and reestablishing guardrails for corporate cash in US democracy.
Michael Beckel, who directs the Money in Politics project for the advocacy group Issue One, said the Hawaii law is a "model for the country" that other states should rush to emulate.
"This measure... is among the most innovative and impactful ideas to curb corporate and dark money spending in campaigns since the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United ruling in 2010," Beckel said. "Those looking to bring more transparency and accountability to elections should embrace this powerful proposal and follow Hawaii’s lead."
End Citizens United, the nonprofit campaign finance reform organization dedicated to overturning the 2010 Supreme Court ruling, also pushed other states to look at Hawaii's law as a roadmap for their own legislation.
"Hawaii has provided a blueprint for how to prevent super PACs from spending dark money by passing state law," the group said in a social media post. "Let this win be a testament to the ability states have to put power back in the hands of everyday people by neutralizing the effects of the Citizens United ruling."
Tom Moore, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, praised the Hawaii law in an interview with The Associated Press, calling it "a brave and bold step to get corporate and dark money out of America’s politics" that "will send a powerful message that will be heard loud and clear across the Pacific and across the mainland."
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'Temporary Relief Isn't Enough,' Advocates Warn After Supreme Court Blocks Abortion Pill Restrictions
"We are relieved that access to mifepristone remains protected for now, but this should never have been on the table in the first place," said one campaigner.
May 14, 2026
While welcoming that the US Supreme Court on Thursday blocked restrictions on dispensing mifepristone—a medication commonly used in abortion and miscarriage care—as a legal battle over it moves forward, rights advocates also continued to sound the alarm about attacks on reproductive freedom and argue that "temporary relief isn't enough."
At issue is the 2023 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision to permanently lift mifepristone's in-person dispensing requirement, which has enabled doctors to serve patients nationwide via telehealth and the mail, as forced pregnancy advocates have intensified the fight for state laws cutting off access to abortion care since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Louisiana sued over the FDA's move, and early this month, the notoriously right-wing US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit halted the agency's rule easing restrictions. Drugmakers Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro appealed, and Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the high court's right-wing supermajority, issued a one-week stay, which he then extended to Thursday evening.
With that deadline looming, the court ultimately blocked the 5th Circuit's ruling. Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, another right-winger, dissented.
"While it is good news that, for now, patients can continue to get this safe medication by mail and at pharmacies as they have for more than five years, we all know abortion opponents are continuing their unpopular and baseless attacks," Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney for the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement.
"And let's be clear about the Trump administration's role here: When nationwide access to a critical abortion and miscarriage medication was on the line, the Trump administration refused to defend the FDA's action and threw patients under the bus," Kaye noted. "The American people have made clear time and again that they oppose political efforts to interfere with their ability to make their own healthcare decisions—and the ACLU will keep fighting with them every step of the way."
Advocates stressed that the fight is far from over. Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said that her organization "is relieved that the Supreme Court granted the emergency appeal to keep mifepristone accessible through telehealth and mail nationwide."
"This decision ensures that people, especially Black, brown, queer, trans, immigrant, poor, and people living in rural communities who already face barriers to healthcare, can continue accessing essential reproductive care," she noted. "While today's decision prevents immediate harm, people's lives shouldn't hang in the balance between back-and-forth litigation."
"Attacks on mifepristone have never been about safety or medicine," Simpson added. "They are about power and control—about who gets to make decisions about their body, their family, and their future."
All* Above All president Nourbese Flint also welcomed the decision while arguing that "the fact that patients and providers were forced to endure the confusion and disruption of care because of yet another court ruling on whether basic healthcare would remain available is unacceptable."
"This legal whiplash is exhausting, dangerous, and completely disconnected from science," Flint continued. "We know that mifepristone is safe and effective, and has been for over 25 years. People should not have to navigate a week-to-week roller coaster just to find out if they can still access basic healthcare and medication they need."
Serra Sippel, executive director of the Brigid Alliance, which helps people forced to travel for abortion care, similarly said that "we are relieved that access to mifepristone remains protected for now, but this should never have been on the table in the first place. Patients and providers should not be forced to wait on court rulings to know whether people can access critical healthcare."
"The back-and-forth of this case does have a cost. Confusion and uncertainty can delay care, and every day makes a difference. When people are pushed later into pregnancy, care becomes harder to access, more expensive, and many more miles further from home," Sippel explained. "We're seeing this firsthand. Last year, the Brigid Alliance helped 1,879 people travel for abortion care—a 35% increase from the year before—and those numbers will continue to rise as state abortion restrictions force more people to cross state lines for care."
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MAGA Supreme Court OKs GOP Overthrow of American Democracy
Disenfranching 40% of a state’s citizens cannot be reconciled with representative democracy.
May 14, 2026
Last week the Supreme Court gave a “two-fer” to white supremacists and proponents of Republican autocracy: First, six right-wing justices completed the erasure of the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act. Second, in the same case, Louisiana v. Callais, the right-winger judges approved of states shaping legislative districts that deny the opposing party any role in government.
In essence, the Supreme Court OK'd the destruction of Congress as an instrument of American democracy.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and ratified five years after the Civil War. The amendment confirmed—in principle—that African-American citizens have the right to vote and to have their votes count.
So said the Constitution. But for almost a century the former Confederate states negated African Americans’ right to vote.
The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The 15th Amendment also gave Congress the power to enforce its mandate. After years of struggle over civil rights—after peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham confronted snarling police dogs, mass arrests, and lethal bombing; after hundreds of nonviolent students worked for freedom in Mississippi in the face of murder, assaults, and the burning of Black churches; after peaceful marchers for voting rights returned to Selma after being clubbed by state troopers and ridden down by racist possemen—Congress tackled the white supremacist obstacles to African-American voting.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the myriad legal schemes that Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans and terminated the ploys used to deny African Americans a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
The outcome: Even as the segregationist white South moved to the Republican Party, African Americans gained substantial voting power and Black legislators were elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local government offices in meaningful numbers. The promise of the 15th Amendment, that all groups are entitled to a meaningful voting opportunity in a multiracial democracy, was mightily advanced.
But white supremacists and MAGA Republicans never accepted the new reality, so their right-wing agents on the Supreme Court finally throttled the Voting Rights Act for them. When the conservative justices threw out a congressional map that upheld Black voters’ right to have their votes count, they unleashed a new wave of state gerrymandering laws, enacted with extraordinary speed, and designed to make African-American voting futile.
To make things worse, the court justified its decision by affirming the power of states to deny meaningful representation to opposing party voters through gerrymandering.
As the right-wing justices explained, carving congressional districts for the purpose of denying representation to Black people may be forbidden (and good luck proving intent to discriminate, when Republican legislators don’t say so out loud). But doing precisely the same thing is fine when the stated purpose is denying representation to an opposing party’s voters.
Get that? The right-wingers of the United States Supreme Court say that judges must stand by and look, powerless to take action, if a state dominated by Republicans decides to manipulate congressional district maps to weaken or destroy the voting power of Democrats.
In practice it amounts to the same thing. The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The GOP’s ultimate goal is the same either way: a Congress under MAGA Republican control regardless of voters. A nation in which African-American political influence is crushed.
What does this look like?
After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature promptly redrew its congressional maps. They sliced up the one district held by a Black Democrat, with the intended outcome that all nine of Tennessee’s representatives will be Republican.
One-third of Tennessee citizens voted for Democrats in 2024. This year that one-third of the population—including the Black voters of Memphis—are to have zero representation in Congress.
South Carolina has begun the same process and anticipates a similar result. Republicans now hold 6 of 7 House seats, and intend to eliminate the one Democrat.
Forty percent of South Carolinians voted Democratic in 2024, and will have zero representation in Congress following redistricting. The one-quarter of South Carolina’s population that are Black will have no district in which their political voice will be heard.
US President Donald Trump has pressed for a similar outcome wherever Republicans control state government. In bright red Indiana (but 38% Democratic), Trump seeks to zero out Democratic representation in Congress.
GOP redistricting is only marginally less extreme elsewhere. In Missouri, for example, 38% of “Show me” state voters are blue, and their representation will be reduced from two to one of the state’s eight congressional seats (12%).
We have separate district elections for Congress so that the range of local communities, with their different racial and ethnic populations, different beliefs, interests, and occupations can have a fair opportunity for representatives of their choosing. Disenfranchisement by gerrymandering thwarts that purpose.
Even more disturbing, Trump’s gerrymandering offensive seeks to flout majority rule by creating a voter-proof Republican Congress.
American voters are increasingly seeing through the failures and the fakery of Donald Trump’s presidency, the broken promises, the corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. And voters see the price they are paying for Trump’s senseless grandiosity, from inflation to healthcare costs to measles, war, and climate change.
But through it all, congressional Republicans have remained Trump’s loyal, submissive toadies.
Voters will certainly make Republicans pay the price this fall. But Trump—with a big assist from MAGA Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—hopes to keep his hold on Congress, voters be damned. If a solid majority of voters cannot shake a would-be totalitarian’s hold on power, what will be left of our constitutional democracy?
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