I’m not going to waste any of your or my time talking about Trump’s State of the Union Speech (which I didn’t watch, in any event). But I do know that instead of focusing on the big problems that the United States should be addressing — the affordability crisis, climate change, unconstrained AI, and the threats to America democracy — he avoided these and blamed the Democrats for everything that ails the nation. 

Still, I want to share with you some good news. 

You may remember that back in November I mentioned that Montana was considering a bill that would effectively negate the Supreme Court’s awful Citizens United decision, which held that corporations are people under the First Amendment and therefore entitled to spend unlimited amounts of corporate money in elections.

A similar bill has just been introduced in California. 

Montana is a great and beautiful state. Some 1,145,000 people live there. But California! Almost 40 million people live in the Golden State. If California were an independent country, it would have the fourth-largest economy in the world (behind Germany and ahead of Japan). 

So the possibility that California might pass this legislation is a very big deal. 

As you know, corporate political spending was growing before Citizens United, but the decision opened the floodgates to the unlimited super PAC spending and undisclosed dark money we suffer from today.

Between 2008 and 2024, reported “independent” expenditures by outside groups........

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