Defeating Citizens United v FEC without a Constitutional Amendment

I have a radical thought about how to get around the Citizens United v FEC Supreme Court ruling with regard to limiting corporate campaign contributions. If I understand the ruling correctly, the issue is that no distinction is made, legally, between a corporation and a person. But, then I realized something. There is a distinction in the U.S. Constitution between citizens and persons. Not all persons are citizens.

The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons, but not citizens. So, couldn't Congress pass a law restricting campaign contributions of non-citizens? So long as court precedent is in place, this would automatically restrict the campaign contributions of corporations.

I'd like to respond to a progressive (liberal) counter-argument that I can foresee and explain why my fellow progressives would not need to worry about it.

I can anticipate the argument that this would restrict the campaign contributions of immigrants.

Let me explain why we progressives wouldn't need to worry about this. A law that restricted campaign contributions by corporations by restricting those of non-citizens could have a high enough cap that most immigrants would be unaffected. For example, if the cap was $1,000,000, or even significantly less (or even $100,000 or possibly even $10,000), few if any immigrants would actually be affected, but corporations would be.

Moreover, passing a law to cap campaign contributions by non-citizens would, I'd imagine, be easier to pass and at a lower cap that the restrictions specific to corporations that the Citizens United v FEC ruling declared unconstitutional. This is because a limitation on non-citizen campaign contributions would be a much less partisan proposition to the American people. It would simply be a law about increasing the integrity of the democratic process and, essentially, making America more democratic. Who could fault anyone for that?

Because it would have this broad popular appeal, we might even get the cap much lower than it was even before the Citizens United v FEC ruling. In fact, we'd actually be leveraging the ruling to make it happen!  If it went to the Supreme Court, they'd be backed into a corner because of the Citizens United v FEC ruling, because they've already ruled that corporations are persons.

Not only that, but such a law would prevent extremely wealthy foreign nationals, such as, say, the king of Saudi Arabia, from making campaign contributions above a certain amount. If only citizens' contributions are un-capped, only actual people people, as opposed to corporate “persons”, and only American people people at that would be able to contribute without restriction.

Most importantly, I think that's how it should be. Why should non-voters be able to affect our policy with money? Let's put power where it was always intended by our Founders: in the hands of the People, not those with the most money. This is a democracy, not an oligarchy, after all.

Yours truly,

Ivan Richmond, Democrat, San Jose, California