Conservatives have spent years claiming Washington holds too much power. We make this argument about education, land use, energy, healthcare, elections, you name it. A republic of 50 sovereign states wasn’t built for every political disagreement to end with Washington’s decision. Utah should run itself like Utah. Montana should get to be Montana.
But there’s this odd exception: money in politics.
Federal courts have spent decades building constitutional barriers that limit what Congress and state legislatures can do about political spending. Take the most famous example, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
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The 2010 decision gets cited all the time — sometimes inaccurately. Citizens United didn’t eliminate campaign finance law. It didn’t say corporations can donate unlimited sums directly to candidates. The Supreme Court still upheld disclosure and disclaimer requirements. What it said was: The government can’t block independent political spending just because the speaker is a corporation or a union.
Conservatives have a serious argument for that result.
Political speech costs money. Running digital ads, launching a website, sending mailers, commissioning polls, organizing volunteers — all of it costs money. If the government decides how much you can spend promoting political ideas, it gets real power over speech. And who makes those decisions? Politicians, of course.
Anyone wary of government should think twice before handing the people in office more power to regulate attempts to vote them out.
But there is another conservative principle at stake: federalism.
The 10th Amendment doesn’t give states the right to ignore the First Amendment. Federalism does not give states authority to violate constitutional rights. The tricky part is finding the line. Have campaign finance rulings set the First Amendment boundary so wide that Congress and the states have little room to govern elections within their own jurisdictions?
The Supreme Court weighed in again this year in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. The justices struck down federal limits on political parties’ coordinated expenditures with their candidates. It wasn’t Citizens United all over again, but the central question remained: How much room do legislatures have to regulate political money?
Look at Montana.
Over a hundred years ago, the Copper Kings there weren’t just fighting for mines — they fought for control of mines, newspapers, judges, legislators, and political offices. The corruption spurred the state’s 1912 Corrupt Practices Act, which restricted corporate political spending.
After Citizens United, Montana wanted to keep its law. Montana’s Supreme Court concluded that the state’s history justified it. But the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed and quickly reversed Montana’s high court in American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock.
Notice the tension. Montana faced a problem. Montanans created a solution. Their courts weighed their specific history. Washington still supplied the answer.
The Federal Election Commission says independent expenditures for the 2023-24 federal election cycle hit $4.4 billion. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that nonprofit groups and shell companies that did not disclose their donors put more than $1.9 billion into the 2024 federal election cycle.
This is no longer hypothetical for me. I am experiencing it in my own race for the Utah House.
Let’s be clear. Outside money and dark money are not the same. An outside group can spend big while disclosing its donors. In my race, the money is flowing through groups that don’t reveal where it’s actually coming from.
I have an obvious interest here. I am a candidate. Readers are free to discount my complaint accordingly.
But take my name off the ballot, and the question remains.
A Utah state representative is supposed to represent Utah voters. Yet organizations hundreds or thousands of miles away can influence who represents a Utah legislative district. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Americans do not lose their First Amendment rights at the Utah border. The concern changes when substantial spending enters a local election, and voters cannot readily determine who financed it. This kind of spending from undisclosed sources has become increasingly common in American elections at all levels.
Protecting political speech does not require treating every question about who financed that speech as an attempt to suppress it.
Citizens United itself recognized this. The court struck down the restriction on independent corporate expenditures while upholding disclosure and disclaimer requirements. Congress, therefore, has more room to act than our national argument sometimes suggests.
Congress could consider strengthening disclosure rules to identify the sources of substantial funds used for election-related spending, along with anti-circumvention rules designed to prevent disclosure requirements from being defeated through pass-through entities.
None of this means you have to toss out Citizens United. Instead, take the court’s rulings seriously: Protect free speech, but use more targeted rules to give voters real information about who’s paying for that speech.
Of course, these laws need careful writing. Disclosure rules can burden small groups or donors who truly face threats or harassment. The goal isn’t to give government an easy way to expose — and maybe punish — everyday people for backing unpopular causes.
Congress should actually use the authority it has. If better transparency solves much of the problem, the constitutional fight looks different. But if problems keep piling up because Congress or states can’t act, then the constitutional question becomes impossible to dismiss.
That is where American Promise belongs in this debate.
The organization advocates the For Our Freedom Amendment. Its approach differs from the familiar demand to simply “overturn Citizens United.” The amendment would give Congress and state legislatures, within their respective jurisdictions, constitutional authority to reasonably regulate and limit campaign contributions and spending. It would also permit governments to distinguish between natural persons and artificial entities when writing those laws.
The amendment would not write one national campaign-finance code into the Constitution. Montana could make one choice. Utah could make another. Congress would regulate federal elections.
That proposal raises legitimate objections. What would stop legislators from writing rules designed to protect themselves? Nothing automatic. Courts would still matter. Constitutional protections would still matter. Political accountability would matter.
Nor should “corporate money” become a lazy synonym for sinister political activity. Newspapers, nonprofit groups, churches, small businesses, and associations of citizens also use the corporate form.
The First Amendment problem is real.
Twenty-five states have passed resolutions calling on Congress to propose an amendment addressing money in elections. Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI) also introduced House Joint Resolution 191, language that American Promise says closely follows its proposal.
That does not mean the amendment is the right answer. It means there is a real constitutional argument.
Perhaps the Supreme Court has struck exactly the right balance. The difficult question is whether our campaign-finance jurisprudence has drawn those constitutional boundaries in the right place.
My own experience in Utah has made that tension harder to dismiss. I do not want the government deciding who may criticize me or how vigorously. That would be a convenient power for an incumbent legislator.
Too convenient.
But I’m not comfortable assuming that every effort to give voters more information about political money, or every argument for returning some authority to Congress and the states, is hostile to free speech.
Citizens United and the cases around it have forced a real debate about competing constitutional concerns: who may spend money to speak, what voters may know about who financed that speech, what counts as genuinely independent political activity, and how much authority the Constitution should leave to Congress and the states.
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Who gets to write the rules?
For conservatives who believe in divided power, representative government, and a healthy suspicion of concentrated authority, that question should not have an automatic answer.
Jason E. Thompson is a member of the Utah House of Representatives.