...The bill takes aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. Lawmakers, drawing from a legal theory developed by the Center for American Progress, argued that because states create corporations and grant them their powers, Hawaii could simply decline to grant corporations the power to spend in elections...

...Democratic Senator Jarrett Keohokalole drew a sharp distinction between the rights of citizens and the powers of corporations, a distinction he said Citizens United had blurred.

“Our rights as individual people don’t come from the government or the Constitution,” Keohokalole said. “As Thomas Jefferson said, all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. They pre-exist the government. The government doesn’t grant us rights. They recognize and protect them.”

Corporate powers, Keohokalole argued, are an entirely different matter.

“They are created by state law,” he said, paraphrasing Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 opinion in* Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward*: “A corporation is an artificial being. It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”...