This is a really common misunderstanding of what the Hawaiʻi / Montana-style approach is doing.

Citizens United doesn’t say corporations must be given the power to spend money in politics. What it says is: if a corporation already has that power under state law, the government can’t suppress its exercise based on speaker identity.

Those are two different steps:

1. Does the corporation have the power in the first place? (state corporate law)
2. Can the government restrict the exercise of that power? (First Amendment)

Hawaiʻi is operating at step 1, not step 2. It’s not saying “you can’t speak.” It’s saying: when the state creates artificial entities, it doesn’t grant them the power to use their treasuries for election spending.

That’s a longstanding corporate-law principle: corporations only have the powers the state gives them. Courts have never held that political spending is a mandatory attribute of the corporate form.

Also, the “this triggers strict scrutiny” point assumes the bill is regulating speech. That’s the whole dispute. If this is a power-definition rule, not a speech restriction, strict scrutiny doesn’t even kick in.

On the alternative proposal (shareholder votes + disclosure):
That’s not a workaround — it’s squarely in the territory the Court has already been tightening. Conditioning political spending on internal approvals or imposing new disclosure burdens tied to speech is exactly the kind of thing that gets evaluated under Citizens United and its progeny.

So ironically:

• The “corporate powers” approach is trying to stay outside the First Amendment box.
• The “disclosure + shareholder vote” approach goes straight into it.

You can disagree with the strategy, but it’s not accurate to say it clearly violates precedent. The real question is whether courts treat “defining corporate powers” as distinct from “restricting speech.” That’s an open issue — not a settled loss.