How the Seventeenth Amendment Can Repeal Citizens United

For more than a century, American democracy has wrestled with a recurring structural failure: concentrated wealth exerting disproportionate control over political representation. This is not a modern anomaly, nor is it a purely partisan complaint. It is a constitutional problem the nation has confronted before and attempted to correct directly.

The Seventeenth Amendment was not a procedural reform. It was a structural intervention designed to remove moneyed interests from the selection of United States Senators.

Today, that intervention is being undermined.

This raises a serious and under examined constitutional question: Can the Seventeenth Amendment be used as a doctrinal basis to overturn Citizens United?

This article argues that it can and that the Constitution itself points in that direction.

Why the Seventeenth Amendment Exists

Before 1913, U.S. Senators were chosen by state legislatures rather than by voters. In theory, this system protected state sovereignty. In practice, it collapsed under the weight of corruption.

By the late nineteenth century, Senate seats were routinely influenced or outright purchased by railroad magnates, industrial trusts, and financial elites. State legislatures deadlocked for months or years. Bribery scandals were common. The Senate earned a reputation as a “millionaires’ club.”

These failures were systemic, not incidental.

Historical documentation compiled by Public Citizen shows that the Seventeenth Amendment was a direct response to this corruption. The amendment was intended to sever the financial pipeline between concentrated wealth and legislative selection by transferring the power to elect Senators directly to the people.

The Seventeenth Amendment was an anti corruption amendment in both design and purpose.

What Citizens United Changed

In 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, holding that corporations and unions may spend unlimited amounts of money on independent political expenditures.

The decision rested on two propositions:

1. Corporations possess First Amendment speech rights

2. Money spent on political messaging constitutes protected speech

While corporations cannot vote, this ruling allows them to dominate the informational environment in which voters make electoral decisions. Senate elections remain formally direct, but the conditions under which voters choose candidates are increasingly shaped by financial power.

This distinction is critical. The Seventeenth Amendment governs who elects Senators. Citizens United governs who controls the landscape in which those elections occur.

In practice, this reintroduces the very influence the amendment was meant to eliminate.

The Constitutional Tension Courts Have Avoided

The conflict is straightforward:

The Seventeenth Amendment exists to prevent wealthy interests from controlling Senate elections.

Citizens United enables wealthy interests to control Senate elections indirectly through overwhelming financial influence.

These principles cannot coexist without subordinating one to the other. Modern jurisprudence has chosen to elevate an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment while treating the Seventeenth Amendment as a completed historical fix rather than an ongoing structural mandate.

That choice is not constitutionally neutral.

Amendments impose continuing obligations. They do not expire when power finds new mechanisms.

Money Is Not a Person and Speech Is Not Structure

Citizens United collapses two distinct constitutional domains: expressive liberty and democratic structure.

The Constitution routinely restricts speech when structural integrity is at stake. Judges are limited in political activity. Foreign nationals are barred from campaign spending. Voting itself is governed by eligibility rules.

These limits are not censorship. They are safeguards of representation.

Money does not deliberate. Money does not represent constituents. Money does not vote.

The Seventeenth Amendment was ratified precisely because money had become a substitute for representation. Allowing that substitution to return under a different constitutional theory defeats the amendment’s purpose.

A Missed Opportunity in Modern Jurisprudence

The concern that Citizens United created a constitutional imbalance is not limited to academics or advocacy groups. On August 29, 2012, Barack Obama publicly called for a constitutional amendment to address the overwhelming influence of corporate money in elections.

That call acknowledged a core reality: when financial power distorts representation, constitutional remedies are appropriate.

Yet the focus has almost exclusively been on proposing new amendments rather than examining whether existing amendments already impose limits that courts have failed to enforce.

The Seventeenth Amendment is the most obvious of those limits.

The States Are Already Acting

This concern is not theoretical. Legislatures in numerous states have formally called for a constitutional amendment to reduce or eliminate the influence of big money in elections, explicitly citing the consequences of Citizens United.

As documented by Public Citizen, these state level resolutions reflect a growing recognition that unlimited political spending has distorted democratic accountability. That states have invoked the amendment process at all underscores a deeper truth: the imbalance created by Citizens United is already understood as a constitutional problem, even if courts have not yet treated it as such.

The states are signaling that representation has been structurally compromised.

A Viable Constitutional Theory

A serious constitutional challenge would not argue that Citizens United violates free speech in isolation. That argument has already failed.

Instead, it would argue:

1. The Seventeenth Amendment establishes a constitutional mandate to insulate Senate elections from concentrated financial control

2. Unlimited independent expenditures undermine that mandate by recreating structural corruption

3. Courts are obligated to harmonize constitutional provisions rather than interpret one in a way that nullifies another

4. Citizens United failed to account for the Seventeenth Amendment’s structural purpose and is therefore wrongly decided

This is orthodox constitutional reasoning. What is unusual is how long it has gone untested.

Starting the Conversation

Constitutional change does not begin in courtrooms. It begins with ideas that force institutions to justify their assumptions.

The Seventeenth Amendment was written to solve a problem that never disappeared. It adapted.

The question now is whether constitutional interpretation will adapt with it.

This argument deserves debate not because it is radical, but because it takes the Constitution seriously as a living structure, not a collection of isolated clauses.

Final Note

This piece is intentionally framed to invite scrutiny, disagreement, and discussion. That is how constitutional arguments mature.

The Constitution already confronted the problem of money controlling representation once.

It may be time to ask why it is being ignored now.