Citizens United turned American elections into a donor-class auction.

The honest situation

The constitutional fix isn’t coming. The state and personal fixes are.

Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010) created the legal architecture that produced Super PACs and the modern flood of unlimited outside spending. Outside spending hit roughly $4.5 billion in the 2024 federal cycle, with more than half coming from groups that do not fully disclose their donors. That is not the system breaking. That is the system operating exactly the way the Supreme Court said it should.

Overturning Citizens United would require a constitutional amendment - two-thirds of both chambers of Congress plus three-quarters of the states. The people who would have to vote on it are largely funded by the system it would change. It will not pass in my term, and any candidate telling you otherwise is selling you something.

What can happen is personal refusal, state-level reform, party-level standards, and the long fight on the federal amendment that Democrats have to actually wage rather than gesture at. All four are real. All four can start now.

My pledge

Refuse the money the system runs on.

This is one of six planks in the pledge. Every federal candidate in the country gets asked, on the record, whether they’ll sign the full document.

What I’ll do federally

Cosponsor the bills. Vote for the amendments. Tell the truth about the odds.

Federal campaign finance reform is the fight where over-promising has done the most damage. Democrats have been promising to overturn Citizens United for fifteen years without the votes to do it. Voters can tell the difference between a promise and a plan. The plan looks like this.

• Cosponsor the DISCLOSE Act. Forces dark-money groups to disclose donors who spend on federal elections. Has passed the House before. Dies at the Senate filibuster.
• Cosponsor every campaign finance reform that moves. Whether or not it has 60 Senate votes. The record matters.
• Push for federal small-donor matching. A six-to-one match on contributions under $200 was the framework in the For The People Act. It is the most effective single reform Democrats could move that doesn’t require a constitutional amendment.
• Cosponsor every constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United while being honest about timelines. A constitutional amendment takes a generation. Voting for the amendment is the right thing to do. Promising voters it’s about to pass is not.
• Push for an SEC rule requiring public companies to disclose political spending to shareholders. It doesn’t require a constitutional amendment, but it does require an SEC willing to act and Congress not blocking the rule through appropriations riders, which is exactly what has happened repeatedly for over a decade. The fight is both for an SEC willing to use the rulemaking authority it has, and against the riders that keep tying its hands.

What I’ll do at the state and local level

Other states have already done the workarounds. Tennessee hasn’t.

The state-level fixes don’t need Citizens United overturned. They operate inside the existing constitutional framework. Some have been tested in court, some are being litigated now, some are still proposals. Tennessee has none of them.

• A Memphis or Shelby County democracy voucher pilot. Modeled on Seattle’s program: every registered voter gets a set of small-dollar vouchers to give to local candidates of their choice. Candidates redeem them for campaign funds in exchange for accepting lower contribution limits and spending caps. Seattle’s program substantially expanded small-donor participation and survived constitutional challenge in the Washington state supreme court. Tennessee has no equivalent. No Tennessee candidate has campaigned on it.
• NYC-style small-donor matching for Memphis municipal races. An eight-to-one match on small contributions, funded by public money. Massively levels the field between candidates with small-dollar bases and candidates with big-dollar donors.
• State-level real-time independent expenditure disclosure. States like California and Washington have stronger and faster disclosure rules for independent expenditures, including 24-to-48-hour reporting in specified windows. Tennessee’s current state-level requirements are looser. The state could match the stronger jurisdictions without waiting for federal action.
• Shareholder vote requirements for corporate political spending. Shareholder-approval requirements have been proposed as a reform model, including in the federal Shareholder Protection Act. The mechanism doesn’t outlaw corporate spending; it requires public-company boards to get shareholder approval before spending corporate treasury funds on politics. Most boards will not ask, which is exactly the point.
• A foreign-influenced corporation ban. Minnesota passed one in 2023 prohibiting political spending by corporations with significant foreign ownership, but a federal court blocked key provisions in 2025. That doesn’t kill the idea. It means the next version has to be drafted with the litigation record in mind. The legal opening for foreign-influence regulation is real, and other states should keep testing it.

What I’ll push at the party level

If the party doesn’t refuse the money, it’s not serious about reform.

The Tennessee Democratic Party can make refusing corporate PAC money, Super PAC support, and dark-money support a condition of endorsement for federal candidates. That commitment costs the party very little to make and changes the credibility of every candidate who carries the endorsement.

A party that wants to argue Citizens United should be overturned and also accepts money from the system Citizens United built has lost the argument. The argument gets won by the party deciding what it will and won’t take.

The pushback I’m ready for

“You can’t compete if you refuse Super PAC support and corporate PAC money.”

This is the argument political consultants make to candidates every cycle. It is also true, in the narrow sense: a candidate who refuses corporate PAC money and refuses Super PAC support cannot match the spending of an opponent who accepts both. The question is whether that matters more than what gets given up.

I might not be able to outspend my opponents. I am not going to try. If the only way to win is to take the money that owns Congress, then winning means becoming what I’m running against. I would rather lose this race honestly than win it bought.

The real audience for this fight isn’t just the current voters in TN-5. It is the next ten Tennessee Democratic candidates who watch how this campaign runs and decide whether to copy it. If the campaign demonstrates that small-donor first, dark-money refused, real-time finance disclosure can produce a competitive race in a gerrymandered district, the model spreads. If it gets buried by Super PAC spending, the consultants win the argument for another decade. The proof of concept is the whole point.