Fifteen years after Mitt Romney stood on an Iowa hay bale and proclaimed that “corporations are people, my friend,” his declaration is no longer mockable. The amount of money corporations spend anonymously to sway federal elections has increased from $359 million in 2012 to $1.4 billion in the most recent presidential cycle. All of that spending by “dark money” nonprofits is protected by the same right to free speech enjoyed by “natural persons,” because the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. FEC that U.S. corporations function as citizen associations under the Constitution.But not all of these “people” are created exactly equal. Whereas humans are automatically granted certain rights at birth, corporate personhood comes into existence under state laws that define its powers—a fact that opponents of corporate money in politics hope to use to transform how U.S. elections are funded. Hawaii is the first state to try. Earlier this month, a nearly unanimous and bipartisan majority—well, as bipartisan as it gets in a state with so few Republicans—of Hawaii’s state legislature voted to change the powers of corporations doing business in the state and no longer grant them the ability to spend on most political causes.“Corporations are not people. They are granted powers and privileges by the state,” State Senator Jarrett Keohokalole told me this week, explaining the rationale of the bill he sponsored. “How can a creation of the state have inalienable rights? It doesn’t make any sense.”The legislation—which Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a Democrat, has not yet signed—is expected to apply to for-profit companies, so-called dark-money nonprofits, unions, and chambers of commerce, potentially cutting off a major revenue stream for the super PACs that dominate politics. The legislation makes exceptions for journalistic work—as in, newspaper editorials explicitly advocating for certain candidates—and company-organized political-action committees that pool individual donations.Under the proposal, Hawaiian corporations would still enjoy personhood of a kind, but they would lack a single ability guaranteed to their living and breathing peers. Supporters point to Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 opinion in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, a landmark case that set the course of corporate law that followed. “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law,” Marshall wrote. “Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who previously worked for a chair of the Federal Election Commission, came up with this legal strategy as a bank-shot attempt to reverse the impact of the 2010 Citizens United decision without directly engaging its First Amendment logic. Moore argues that states can change their corporate laws while sidestepping free-speech questions because the corporate charter—that “mere creature of law”—precedes any constitutional right. “This is not a campaign-finance regulation,” he told me. “You have to look at it differently.”This year, his evangelizing led to the introduction of legislation in 15 states, Moore said, but only Hawaii was able to get a bill to a governor’s desk. In Montana, activists are gathering signatures in hope of making the issue a ballot initiative in November. “We need to have an answer to all the money in politics these past 15 years,” Jeff Mangan, the organizer of that effort, told me.[Read: Big Sky crack-up]As a political matter, the gambit is likely popular. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that, among both Republicans and Democrats, more than seven in 10 support limits on the amount of money organizations can spend on political campaigns. YouGov polling last year for Issue One, a group advocating for more restrictions on money in politics, found that 73 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans disapproved of the Citizens United finding that corporations have the same free-speech rights as individual citizens.But the idea, at least so far, has been widely dismissed by corporate-campaign-finance attorneys and some conservative constitutional scholars, who long ago internalized Romney’s maxim of corporate personhood, which he offered in Iowa as a defense of lower corporate taxes. They reject Moore’s arguments that state corporate charters are exempt from the Supreme Court’s protection of collective speech. “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Citizens United decision.“This isn’t a semantic game. Partnerships and loose organizations, all of them have the same rights,” Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told me. “The bottom-line issue is you are trying to regulate corporate speech, and Citizens United speaks directly to that.”Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez, a Democrat, agrees, and warned the state’s legislature that the bill is likely to be rejected by the courts, after some expense to the state in legal fees. “Although states have the authority to determine what powers a corporation has, if a state tries to remove a corporation’s power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity, under Citizens United, a state would then be attempting to take away a corporation’s right to speak,” she wrote earlier this year.Nonetheless, the bill passed unanimously in the state Senate and lost only one vote in the state House—from a Republican who called the intent of the bill “amazing” but agreed with Lopez that the court fight would be futile. The next step will be a decision by Green about whether to sign the bill into law. Lawmakers involved in the effort told me they expect him to soon. (If he happens to not sign it, those same lawmakers said that the legislature is unlikely to override a veto.) Erika Engle, Green’s press secretary, told me in a statement that the governor would announce his decision “at the appropriate time” and that he “recognizes the precedent-setting nature of this legislation and thanks the Legislature for its hard work on this matter.”Green’s signature would likely trigger lawsuits, setting off months or years of litigation that could eventually lead back to the Supreme Court. It would also provide fresh water-cooler fodder for corporate-law professors, who have begun to debate among themselves how to settle the conflicting interests of the First Amendment and state power to define corporations, two bodies of jurisprudence with long traditions in American law. “It’s novel enough that I think it is hard to predict how a conservative court would react,” Jill Fisch, a business-law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It is a great, creative initiative.”It could also restart the national conversation over the growing role corporations play in American public life. Even in the age of emerging artificial intelligence, “people” without flesh and blood still have their limits. “That is what I have been arguing all along,” Hawaiian State Senator Karl Rhoads, another sponsor of the bill, told me. “Corporations are just piles of papers.”