Senator Quirmbach Announces Corporate Democracy and Shareholder Protection Act of 2010

On Wednesday, January 27, 2010, State Senator Herman Quirmbach (D-Ames) announced an initiative to pass the Iowa Corporate Democracy and Shareholder Protection Act of 2010. The act would limit the potential flood of corporate campaign money into political campaigns.

The floodgates were opened by last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to make direct expenditures on ads for or against candidates for office. This decision overturns nearly a century of precedent and threatens to overwhelm individual candidates’ abilities to present their positions.

Quirmbach said, “The entry of gargantuan corporate direct expenditures would further escalate campaign spending that is already out of control and drown out the voices of ordinary voters.” He added, “It would allow corporate executives to divert shareholder funds into supporting political candidates that individual shareholders might strongly oppose.”

Quirmbach’s proposed law would rein in corporate political expenditures in two ways:

• by requiring prior approval by a majority shareholder vote for expenditure amounts on a candidate by candidate basis, with per-share donation amounts explicitly deducted from shareholder dividends, and
• by allowing individual shareholders to opt out of having political donations deducted from their dividends, again on a candidate by candidate basis.

“While the Supreme Court has said corporations have a right to political speech,” Quirmbach observed, “that should not mean that they have the right to use a shareholder’s money to sponsor advocacy of a candidate the shareholder abhors. Shareholders must have a voice in how their own money is used.”