‘It’s a Big Club and You’re Not In It’: Assemblymember Chris Rogers on Dark Money, Rural Power and the June Primary

This is the second in a series of reports from Rogers’s April 4 town hall in Southern Humboldt arranged by 2nd District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell. The first piece covered Rogers’s warnings about federal Medicaid cuts and their impact on local healthcare institutions. Future reports will cover PG&E and energy infrastructure, the proposed Garberville Business Improvement District, old-growth protections, the state’s forestry and biomass bills, and the nationwide US Forest Service restructuring and what it means for Northern California.

On Saturday, when Assemblymember Chris Rogers told a small crowd in Garberville that he had introduced a bill to strip corporations of the power to spend money in elections, a few people in the room wanted to know what they could do to help. His answer had less to do with Sacramento than it did with the June primary. Two days later, the bill got its first public hearing.

To understand why Rogers’s bill matters, it helps to know what Citizens United is and why it still comes up 16 years later.

In 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that corporations have the same First Amendment free speech rights as people when it comes to spending money in elections. Before that ruling, federal law capped how much corporations could spend to influence campaigns. After it, the floodgates opened. Outside spending in elections went from $574 million in the 2008 cycle to $4.5 billion by 2024. Most of that money flows through super PACs, which can accept unlimited corporate donations and spend without limit as long as they do not directly coordinate with a candidate. The Roosevelt Institute found that over 80% of what billionaires spent in the 2024 election cycle went through channels that would have been illegal before Citizens United. In the same cycle, shell companies and nonprofits that did not disclose their funding sources gave $1.3 billion to super PACs alone.

Polls have consistently shown around 80% of Americans oppose the ruling, across party lines. Despite that, it has largely stayed in place. Challenging Citizens United directly would require either a constitutional amendment or the Supreme Court reversing itself. Neither has happened. And until recently, few lawmakers have taken a serious run at it.

That is one of the “hard things” Rogers says his office is trying to do.

Rogers has been in office since December 2024, barely a year and a half, and he has spent that time introducing legislation that more experienced Sacramento hands have largely left alone. “We’re trying to do the hard things,” he told the Garberville crowd.

The bill he was referring to is AB 1984. The bill number is not an accident. Rogers’s legislative director chose it deliberately, a nod to George Orwell’s novel about a society where truth is controlled by the powerful and the individual has no meaningful voice.

“It’s a big club, and you’re not in it,” Rogers told the room, quoting comedian George Carlin. “Looking at what has happened in this country over the last 16 years since Citizens United passed, that’s exactly what it feels like.”

The bill does not try to overturn Citizens United. It takes a different route entirely. Corporations only exist because states create them. The powers they have, from limited liability to perpetual duration, are granted by state law. What the state gives, the state can take away. AB 1984 rewrites California’s corporate code to say that corporations operating in the state do not have the power to spend money in elections. It sidesteps the rights question the Supreme Court ruled on and goes straight to the powers question the court did not touch.

The approach is modeled on the Montana Plan, a bipartisan effort led by former Democratic US Sen. Jon Tester and former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot, among others. The Montana effort has had a bumpy road. Organizers first tried to put the measure on the 2026 ballot as a constitutional amendment, but Montana’s attorney general rejected it in October 2025, saying it violated the state’s rules for ballot measures. The Montana Supreme Court upheld that rejection in January 2026. Organizers went back to the drawing board, refiled as a simpler statutory measure, and on April 1, just three days before the Garberville town hall, the Montana Supreme Court cleared that version to begin gathering signatures for the November ballot. An October 2025 poll found 74% of Montana voters, including majorities of Republicans and independents, support the effort.

Rogers introduced AB 1984 in January, modeling it on the same legal theory. According to Rogers, the Center for American Progress, which had developed that theory and was focused on Montana, called his office afterward. They had been watching Montana and hadn’t expected California to move on it independently, Rogers said. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote about the bill approvingly in February, calling Rogers and Senate co-author Mike McGuire “the heroes of the day.”

The bill was referred to both the Banking and Finance Committee and the Judiciary Committee in March. Yesterday, April 6, it got its first public airing before the Banking and Finance Committee, chaired by Assemblymember Avelino Valencia. No vote was taken. The bill was listed for testimony only, a standard step that allows the committee to hear from supporters and opponents before deciding whether to advance it.

The support and opposition were both substantial and telling.

On the support side, the Center for American Progress signed on as a sponsor. Locally, the City of Eureka filed support, as did the Humboldt County Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program and Health Care for All, the Mendocino County Democratic Central Committee, the Sonoma County Democratic Party, and several Indivisible chapters including Indivisible Ukiah and Indivisible Sonoma County.

The opposition was led by the California Chamber of Commerce and included roughly 20 business groups: the California Building Industry Association, California Trucking Association, California Grocers Association, California Retailers Association, California Hospital Association, the National Federation of Independent Business, and others. Their stated argument is that the bill would violate First Amendment protections and create unintended legal consequences for businesses that have never engaged in political activity.

The committee’s own nonpartisan analysis flagged a separate concern beyond the First Amendment argument: by creating a closed list of permitted corporate activities, the bill may inadvertently restrict routine business actions that were never intended to be limited. The analysis asks whether a corporation that takes an action not expressly included on that list, even one unrelated to politics, could trigger the bill’s automatic forfeiture provision and lose its corporate protections as a result. Rogers will need to address it for the bill to move forward.

The California Hospital Association’s opposition is worth noting in context. Healthcare was the central issue at Saturday’s town hall, where Rogers described federal Medicaid cuts as the biggest crisis the state will face. The same hospitals he was defending against federal funding cuts were, two days later, listed in opposition to his campaign finance bill. The bill applies not just to for-profit corporations but explicitly to nonprofits as well. That would include trade associations and advocacy groups like hospital associations that regularly weigh in on ballot measures and legislation affecting their members.

Rogers acknowledged at the town hall that the Banking and Finance Committee is full of legislators who have largely benefited from the current system. What he is asking them to do is look at the machine that elected them and vote to change it.

“It’s a tough lift,” he told the room in Garberville. “We’ll see what happens.”

The committee’s own analysis also raised a broader limitation worth being honest about: even if the bill passes, it will not stop unlimited individual spending by billionaires or out-of-state nonprofits with minimal California ties. The top donor in the 2024 federal election cycle, Elon Musk, spent $280 million as an individual. The bill targets the corporate conduit, not the individual. Rogers knows this. He described the bill at the town hall as a significant step, not a complete solution.

Rogers’s pitch on Citizens United lands in the middle of a broader conversation California is having about itself. The state has gone from a budget surplus to a long-term structural deficit. Dissatisfaction with Sacramento cuts across party lines. Even among Democrats, frustration has grown that the state has not delivered on its promises, a tension that found a national audience in Abundance, the 2025 bestseller by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which argued that well-intentioned liberal governance has become so tangled in its own regulatory instincts that California struggles to actually build, fix, or change things.

Rogers acknowledged the book’s critique at the town hall and said there is something to it but warned that the same argument is already being used in Sacramento to justify freezing environmental building requirements for five years, a move he did not vote for. The concern is that the critique of overregulation, however valid in some contexts, becomes cover for giving industry what it already wanted. AB 1984 asks legislators to draw a different line: not less regulation across the board, but a specific, targeted withdrawal of a corporate power that Rogers argues never should have existed in the first place.

Rogers did not leave the room without giving people something concrete to do. The governor’s race, he said, is where that frustration has somewhere to go right now.

California has 61 candidates on the June 2 primary ballot to replace term-limited Gavin Newsom, a crowded field that has Democrats worried about splitting their vote and handing the governor’s office to a Republican for the first time in 15 years. Rogers’s point was direct: there is no celebrity candidate in this race, no Arnold, no Gavin, nobody coasting on star power. The candidates need to build a coalition to win, and that means they cannot write off rural communities. Right now, before the June primary, is when that leverage works. Rogers has not endorsed anyone and said he attended the California Democratic Party convention last month with the tongue-in-cheek goal of asking every candidate he encountered to drop out. Nobody is dropping out, he acknowledged, and he warned that if either of the two Republicans wins, it would grind the legislature to a halt.

In a state where rural voices often feel like an afterthought, Rogers said the crowded field actually works in their favor. Before any candidate earns Southern Humboldt’s support, residents should be asking where they stand on corporate election spending, who they plan to put on the CPUC, how they intend to fund rural healthcare, and what they will actually do for communities still trying to find their footing after years of economic decline.

“You can’t just run as a star who’s going to appeal to a big city when you have 25% of the population living in rural areas,” Rogers said. “You can’t write off a fourth of the community.”

One gubernatorial candidate has already come calling. Rogers said billionaire Tom Steyer reached out after AB 1984 was introduced, expressing support and interest in backing it as a ballot initiative if it fails in the legislature, though the bill would not limit what individuals like Steyer can spend directly.

For Southern Humboldt residents watching storefronts go dark on their main street, paying over $6 a gallon for gas, and wondering whether their local emergency room will still be open in five years, Rogers’s focus on campaign finance law might seem like a problem one layer removed from the day-to-day. He made the connection himself.

The unlimited election spending that Citizens United enabled, he argued, is part of how policy ends up serving the wealthy rather than the people who live in places like this. Fix that, and the downstream fights, over healthcare funding, over PG&E accountability, over who actually gets represented in Sacramento, get a little less uphill. AB 1984 appears to be Roger’s attempt to pull on that thread from Sacramento, one committee vote at a time.

Reporting on other topics from the April 4 town hall will continue, including PG&E and energy infrastructure, the proposed Garberville Business Improvement District, old-growth protections, Rogers’s forestry and biomass bills, and the nationwide US Forest Service restructuring.

Articles in this series: 

• ‘We’re Trying to Do the Hard Things’, Assemblymember Rogers Told SoHum in a Town Hall Yesterday
• ‘It’s a Big Club and You’re Not In It’: Assemblymember Chris Rogers on Dark Money, Rural Power and the June Primary
• Old Trees, New Laws: Southern Humboldt Brings Its Forestry Concerns to Town Hall