Legislators showed strong support for a bill that would require a majority of shareholders to approve the donations from corporations and cooperatives giving contributions to state and local political campaigns at a public hearing Wednesday.
The bill will bring state law into compliance with a January Supreme Court decision and establish a series of reporting and registration requirements for any corporate disbursements to political campaigns.
These requirements would include a majority of shareholders’ approval from the last two years as well as a public disclosure on the amount and nature of the donations.
“This bill is a push for corporate democracy,” co-sponsor Sen. Robert Wirch, D-Pleasant Prairie, said during the hearing. “I strongly believe this is common sense legislation that will give shareholders a voice in how their money is spent in Wisconsin elections.”
The January Supreme Court decision ruled the U.S. government could not ban political spending by corporations in political elections.
The slim 5-4 victory held that donations from corporate treasury funds to political candidates were a constitutionally protected form of free speech.
Current Wisconsin law prohibits corporations and cooperatives from making contributions to any state or local campaigns.
“The ruling was based on, and is also a significant expansion of, two doctrines: that money is speech and that corporations are people,” Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, said at the hearing. “The word corporation does not appear one time in the Bill of Rights or the entire U.S. Constitution.”
Many have criticized the Supreme Court decision, including President Barack Obama, as a partisan decision based largely on ideological reasoning. However, the decision does allow states to impose regulations requiring shareholder approval of corporate disbursements.
“The purpose here is to simply require that if a corporation wants to spend a lot of money on a candidate, at the very least it must have the support of the majority of its shareholders,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin.
The Supreme Court decision overruled political financing laws in Wisconsin as well as two previous precedents on the First Amendment rights of corporations.
One of the precedents overturned upheld a campaign financing reform act co-sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and commonly referred to as the McCain-Feingold law.
“It’s ironic, because it’s the conservatives who have said there should be judicial restraint, but this is judicial activism on steroids,” Heck said.
Supporters of the bill claim it will help to maintain fair campaign financing by Wisconsin corporations.
“The Supreme Court decision was one of the worst decisions we have had in a long time. It opens the door to unlimited corporate expenditures in elections,” Sen. Spencer Black, D- Madison, said. “Of course this bill won’t reverse the Supreme Court decision, but it will mitigate it somewhat.”
