Overturning Citizens United is only one step toward limiting money in politics.
A constitutional amendment will not fix money in politics by itself. It only removes a legal obstacle. The actual limits, disclosure rules, and enforcement still have to be written and passed by the same Congress that depends on the current system remaining broken.
Two different amendments circulate under the same banner. Many people believe Citizens United established that corporations are people with a right to spend on elections, and that reversing this premise would solve the problem of money in politics. The popular amendment answers exactly that belief. It declares corporations are not people and removes the constitutional protection Citizens United gave to corporate political spending.
A second amendment targets a different premise: that spending money to influence an election counts as constitutionally protected speech at all. Removing this premise would open contribution and spending limits to real regulation, for corporations and individuals alike, because the constitutional shield blocking all of it would be gone.
The second amendment undoes SpeechNow. The popular one does not.
Citizens United held that independent expenditures do not create quid pro quo corruption or its appearance, removing the government’s constitutional basis for limiting them. SpeechNow extended the logic one step further. If the expenditures carry no risk of corruption, the court reasoned, there is no remaining basis to limit contributions to a group that spends only in an independent way. Corporate personhood played no role in either holding. Direct contributions to candidates stayed capped for individuals and banned for corporations. Money into super PACs did not.
A donor can max out to a candidate at $3,500 and then pour unlimited sums into a super PAC supporting that same candidate. The legal distinction is independence: the super PAC cannot coordinate its spending with the campaign. In practice, the separation is remarkably thin. Shared staff, overlapping consultants, identical messaging, and perfectly synchronized timing do not, by themselves, establish coordination. A candidate’s own former campaign manager can leave, form the super PAC, and run the outside spending operation without that fact alone establishing coordination. The rules require evidence meeting specific legal tests for interaction between the campaign and the outside group. The same networks, operatives, consultants, and large donors move between campaigns and outside groups while the spending remains legally independent. The money travels through a different vehicle, so candidate contribution limits and the corporate contribution ban do not apply. This has been standard practice since at least 2012. The personhood amendment does not touch any of it.
The label is independence. The function is a vehicle for personal or special interests—with no effective ceiling or controls.
Changing this requires changing the underlying doctrine, through a constitutional amendment or a future Court reversal. Such an amendment would only clear the constitutional barrier. Congress still has to write the contribution limits, spending caps, and disclosure requirements, then pass them through the same donor-driven process the amendment was meant to constrain. The Federal Election Commission would still enforce whatever emerges. The FEC has six commissioners, no more than three from the same political party, and four votes are required for official action. A 3–3 split means no action. An amendment does not change the structure, assuming Congress even passed appropriate laws. Passage is the same problem arriving earlier. Two-thirds of both houses, then 38 states. The people who must vote for it are the incumbents whose campaigns are financed by the system they would be restricting.
Other reforms do not wait on the amendment. Congress can require far more disclosure of who is funding political spending. It can tighten the rules defining coordination between campaigns and outside groups, narrowing the space in which supposedly independent spending now operates. Both are available under current constitutional limits.
Some tools Congress has now. Others require removing the constitutional barrier. Either way, Congress must write the law.
References
Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) — https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec
SpeechNow.org v. FEC, 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010) — https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/speechnoworg-v-fec
Background Reading
Politico, “2011 sees super PAC explosion” — https://www.politico.com/story/2011/10/2011-sees-super-pac-explosion-065310
AP News, “Maine’s voter-approved limit on PAC contributions triggers lawsuit” — https://apnews.com/article/maine-referendum-super-pac-donation-limits-dccfd8f49c4337b1d9e7053a0e3a4fef