UPDATED – Southern Brooklyn Assemblyman William Colton introduced a bill recently that would give shareholders in a company the ability to regulate its political activities.
Titled the Shareholders United Act, the bill is a modeled on legislation introduced by Maryland State Senator Jamie B. Raskin.
Both Colton and Raskin’s measures are a response to the landmark 2010 United States Supreme Court ruling on the Citizens United case, which opened the floodgates in allowing corporations and unions the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign ads and other political tools.
But in his decision Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote that creating a shareholder solution to the ruling might be the answer to regulating corporate campaign spending.
Kennedy opinioned that while the government cannot block corporate political spending, corporations shouldn’t be able to block citizen-shareholders’ money on political campaigns without their consent – thus creating a “corporate democracy.”
Colton, noting that corporate managers have the ability to spend millions in partisan campaigns without the knowledge of shareholders, argued that his legislation would create a sense of transparency between the political actions of corporations and shareholders.
