FILE - The U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. A forthcoming ballot initiative in Oregon could test whether the court's 2010 Citizens United decision is vulnerable.
Matt Rourke / AP
For the first time in three decades, Oregon will place limits on political donations beginning in January.
But months before that change, the next tussle over Oregon campaign finance laws is already getting underway — and could land Oregon in the vanguard of states pursuing a novel legal theory that aims to radically change state politics.
Reformers plan to file ballot proposals this month that, if passed in 2028, would usher in the kind of system they believe Oregonians want. That includes tighter limits on how much candidates can accept, and transparency about where campaign funds originate.
Perhaps most notably, the group Honest Elections Oregon plans to pursue a future where some of the state’s biggest political spenders — businesses and labor unions — are banned from cutting checks altogether.
One ballot initiative the group has been preparing would amend the state constitution to bar corporations, nonprofits and other business entities from spending any money to influence political races.
That’s a change that has long been viewed as impossible. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations have First Amendment rights that include the ability to dump unlimited money into political messaging.
But Dan Meek and Jason Kafoury, two attorneys who are the driving force behind Honest Elections, say Citizens United is vulnerable. They’re hopeful that a theory unveiled last year by the Center for American Progress, a progressive Washington, D.C. think tank, can defang the ruling.
The concept, sometimes called the “corporate power reset,” has already passed Hawaii’s Legislature. Montana voters are on track to decide in November whether that state will follow suit. Dozens of other states are said to be sniffing around the idea.
Kafoury and Meek want to put Oregon in the conversation with the initiative they expect to file as early as next week.
“It has national momentum right now,” Kafoury said.
But in a state where caps on political contributions are just about to kick in after decades of unlimited spending, critics say putting additional proposals before voters in 2028 risks chaos.
“This says to me they’re not interested in implementing a system that works,” said Felisa Hagins, director of the Service Employees International Union’s Oregon State Council, which helped negotiate Oregon’s forthcoming campaign finance laws. “I’m interested in implementing a system that works.”
A new approach to Citizens United
The theory for upending Citizens United centers on a simple idea: Corporations and other business entities only exist because states grant them the right to exist, offering certain legal privileges and protections.
But Tom Moore, the Center for American Progress attorney who came up with the concept, says states don’t have to include spending on politics as a right they give corporations. They can simply deny them the option.
“Ever since 1819, states have put in these ‘reserve powers clauses’ that say, ‘Hey, we can change up your powers at any time or get rid of you at any time, just so you know,’” Moore told OPB. “And the Supreme Court has held that authority to be just about absolute since the 1840s.”
Moore argues this concept is so fundamental that it’s been largely forgotten. But he’s convinced that even the currently conservative Supreme Court will be hard-pressed to unwind a bedrock precedent of federalism.
Plenty of people disagree. Critics of Moore’s theory say that it’s patently unconstitutional, denying First Amendment rights to everything from massive multinational corporations to tiny nonprofits.
Hawaii’s law has already generated a challenge in federal court on the grounds that it stifles speech and curtails Americans’ rights to assemble, among other things.
“A lot of the people that are supporting this law don’t understand that it isn’t just about IBM or Meta or any of these things,” said Owen Yeates, an attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Free Speech, which filed the suit on behalf of a Hawaii advocacy nonprofit. “It affects any corporation.”
Yeates and other opponents reject the theory as little more than a semantic word game. But they say it poses a real threat of narrowing political dialogue so that only candidates, political action committees and wealthy individuals — who are not impacted — have their voices heard.
“Most people can’t afford a television advertisement, a digital campaign or the cost of creating a political action committee,” Bradley Smith, chair of the Institute for Free Speech, wrote in a recent op-ed. “So individuals band together in organizations — nonprofits, unions, advocacy groups and for-profit corporations — with like-minded people, pool their resources and express views that otherwise might go unheard.”
In Oregon, the effects of blocking corporate spending could be profound.
Though contribution limits are set to kick in next year, political players will still be able to spend unlimited money on “independent expenditures” because of Citizens United. That would leave the door open, for instance, for unions that back a Democratic gubernatorial hopeful to purchase ads supporting the candidate, or for business interests to do the same with a favored Republican. Such spending would be impermissible under the proposal Kafoury and Meek plan to file.
News of the forthcoming initiative has drawn mixed responses from officials and groups that hammered out the campaign contribution limits taking effect next year.
A spokeswoman for House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, said Fahey “has long said that meaningful campaign finance reform is not possible while Citizens United is the law of the land.”
“She believes the concepts in Hawaii and Montana are intriguing, and she will be following the legal developments in the Hawaii case as they unfold,” the spokeswoman, Jill Bakken, said in an email. “Our office hasn’t yet seen any specifics on similar ballot measures or legislative efforts here in Oregon.”
Meanwhile, Oregon Business & Industry, the state’s largest business lobbying group, suggested in a statement to OPB it would oppose the effort.
“OBI believes any campaign finance regulations must be constitutional, must not discriminate against or disqualify specific groups of donors, and must promote a level playing field for all candidates and causes,” the statement said. “We will reserve further comment until an initiative petition is filed in Oregon.”
But even skeptics who believe the idea is illegal don’t doubt it could pass if it lands on the ballot. Campaign finance limits are broadly popular in Oregon, and Honest Elections and its allies have a history of putting similar measures before voters.
In 2024, the near-certainty that the coalition would pass strict statewide contribution limits at the ballot prompted panic in the Capitol. To get rid of the proposal, unions, labor groups and top lawmakers negotiated their own campaign finance bill, passing it in a whirlwind month-long session.
When the law kicks in next year, it will mark the first time the state has seen limits on political contributions since 1997, when a now-overturned Oregon Supreme Court ruling deemed such caps unconstitutional.
But not everyone is happy with the new limits. Earlier this year, legislators approved a bill that changed portions of the campaign finance law before it could take effect next year.
Proponents said the updates were necessary to correct flaws. Meek, Kafoury and other hard-liners were apoplectic.
“They destroyed the structure of the contribution limits by blowing huge loopholes into the system,” Kafoury said. “I said publicly when the Legislature did what they did that we were going to go to the ballot in 2028.”
If all goes to plan, Kafoury said last week, the group’s first ballot petitions will be filed by the end of the month. More could follow, setting the stage for Oregon’s latest pitched battle on campaign funding.
