In Hawaii this year (2026) we have a chance to nullify the effects of the 2010 Citizens United ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.
SB2471 is currently in conference committee and we need to get conferees appointed and build support among legislators to get it passed before the end of session and to the Governor. Here’s some information for contacting legislators:
Ask House and Senate Leadership and Urge Them to Appoint Conferees
House Speaker Nakamura: [email protected], 808-586-6100
House Vice Speaker Ichiyama: [email protected], 808-586-6220
House Majority Leader Quinlan: [email protected], 808-586-6380
Senate President Kouchi: [email protected], 808-586-6030
Senate Vice President Kidani: [email protected], 808-586-7100
Senate Majority Leader Kanuha: [email protected], 808-586-9385
Contact your Representative and Senator and urge them to support the bill
In case you don’t know who your legislators are, you can find them here: https://search.capitol.hawaii.gov/?type=legislator-addresses.
Important Points About the Corporate Power Reset Approach
What this bill does. SB2471 defines the powers Hawaiʻi grants to artificial persons — corporations, LLCs, nonprofits, and other state-created or state-licensed entities. It provides every power necessary or convenient to carry out lawful business or charitable purposes, but not the power to spend in elections or on ballot measures. Every natural person in Hawaiʻi retains every political right they have ever had: the right to speak, spend, donate, organize, form PACs, and run for office. This bill touches none of those rights.
Why it works. This is not campaign-finance regulation. It is corporate redefinition. Citizens United struck down a restriction on political spending by corporations that already possessed the power to spend. It did not hold that states must grant that power in the first place. SB2471 operates upstream of Citizens United, in the domain of state corporate law where the Supreme Court has affirmed state authority as absolute for more than two centuries. The governing precedents are Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), CTS Corp. v. Dynamics Corp. of America (1987), and Hawaiʻi’s own Article I, Section 21, which provides that the state’s power to act in the general welfare shall never be impaired by irrevocable grants of special privileges.
This bill is constitutionally sound. SB2471 defines what the corporate form is for — it does not restrict, prohibit, or punish speech by an already-empowered entity. That distinction is dispositive. The constitutional tests that apply to speech regulation — strict scrutiny, content-based analysis, unconstitutional conditions — govern the regulatory domain, where government restricts what empowered actors may do. SB2471 operates in the power-granting domain, where government defines what artificial persons are. No case in any jurisdiction has ever held that a state must grant political spending power to the corporations it creates, that strict scrutiny applies to a state’s definition of corporate powers, or that reserved-powers clauses are subject to a First Amendment exception. Those cases do not exist.
This is not novel — it is dusty. For the first century of American corporate history, every corporation operated under set lists of powers. Political spending was never on those lists. Approximately a thousand national banks operate today under charters that have never included election-spending power. No court has ever treated that absence as constitutionally suspect.
What it covers. Because the bill applies to all artificial persons — including 501(c)(4) nonprofits and LLCs — it eliminates the dark-money channels that allow anonymous spending to flood elections. And because Hawaiʻi law already provides that foreign corporations cannot exercise any power a domestic corporation cannot exercise, SB2471 keeps every corporation, no matter where chartered, out of Hawaiʻi’s politics.
The people want this. A national October 2025 YouGov survey found that 72 percent of voters support this approach after hearing balanced pro-and-con messaging — including 81 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of Republicans, and 60 percent of independents. Majorities said they would back it even if it applied equally to unions or affected causes they personally support.
Hawaiʻi is not alone. Bills reflecting this approach have been introduced in Arizona, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. A ballot initiative in Montana has cleared legal review and is collecting signatures for the 2026 ballot. Hawaiʻi has the opportunity to lead the nation here.
Hawaiʻi’s constitution anticipated this moment. Article I, Section 21 provides that the power of the state to act in the general welfare “shall never be impaired by the making of any irrevocable grant of special privileges or immunities.” The framers placed that clause in Hawaiʻi’s constitution because they understood that powers granted to artificial entities can be turned against the public interest, and that the state must never lose the authority to reclaim what it has given. SB2471 exercises that authority.