A Cautionary Tale of Corporate Political Spending Emerges in Minnesota

Long regarded as a leader in campaign finance reform, Minnesota until this year had some of the nation’s toughest laws on political spending by corporations. With the federal government and many other states, Minnesota for decades tried to tame corporate political participation through various restrictions on expenditures.Minnesota legislators considered encroachment on the political process so severe that by 1988 they wound up with a comprehensive ban on corporate spending in attempts to influence the outcome of the state’s elections.Violations by corporate executives, officers, other individuals and even stockholders meant up to $20,000 in fines and as much as five years in prison. Corporations themselves faced up to $40,000 in fines and dissolution. In addition to fines, corporations registered outside Minnesota could forfeit the right to do business in the Gopher State.That all changed on Jan. 21 when a bitterly divided U.S. Supreme Court threw open the door to unlimited corporate and union campaign spending from their own pockets in its long-anticipated decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In one fell swoop, a five-justice conservative majority ignored more than 100 years of legislation and jurisprudence to the contrary and held that spending restrictions violate corporate rights to free speech… Read full this story

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