Laserfiche WebLink
.!-:tr. ........ <br /> COUNTY OF HAWAII - _ STATE OF HAWAII <br /> RESOLUTION NO. 263 12 <br /> A RESOLUTION URGING THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS TO PASS AND SEND <br /> TO THE STATES FOR RATIFICATION OF A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT TO <br /> REVERSE CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION(2010). <br /> WHEREAS,the protections afforded by the First Amendment to the United States <br /> Constitution to the people of our nation are fundamental to our democracy; and <br /> WHEREAS, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution was designed to <br /> protect the free speech rights of individual human beings ("natural persons"), not corporations; <br /> and <br /> WHEREAS, corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution and We The People <br /> have never recognized the extension of fundamental constitutional rights to corporations, nor <br /> have We decreed that corporations have authority that exceeds the authority of We the People; <br /> and <br /> WHEREAS, corporate misuse of the First Amendment and the Constitution reached an <br /> extreme conclusion in the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal <br /> Election Commission (2010); and <br /> WHEREAS, the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal <br /> Election Commission (2010) represents a serious and direct threat to our democracy; and <br /> WHEREAS, the Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission <br /> (2010) overturned longstanding precedent prohibiting corporations from spending their general <br /> treasury funds in our elections; and <br /> WHEREAS, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) overturned the <br /> Court's earlier decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990), which recognized <br /> the threat to a republican form of government posed by "the corrosive and distorting effects of <br /> immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and <br /> that have little or no correlation to the public's support for the corporation's political ideas;" and <br /> WHEREAS, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) also overturned <br /> aspects of the Court's more recent decision in McConnell v. FEC(2005), which by contrast had <br /> upheld the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), an act whose modest reforms <br /> were being challenged in Citizens United; and <br />