THE VALUE OF A VALUE
"Democratic Senator Jarrett Keohokalole drew a sharp distinction between the rights of citizens and the powers of corporations, a distinction he said Citizens United had blurred.
“Our rights as individual people don’t come from the government or the Constitution,” Keohokalole said. “As Thomas Jefferson said, all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. They pre-exist the government. The government doesn’t grant us rights. They recognize and protect them.”
Corporate powers, Keohokalole argued, are an entirely different matter.
“They are created by state law,” he said, paraphrasing Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 opinion in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward: “A corporation is an artificial being. It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”
He then drew a direct line from that history to Hawaii’s own experience with corporate power. The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, he said, was organized and executed by sugar companies. The “Big Five” then ruled Hawaii for 50 years before a new generation of residents ran for office, took over the Legislature and won statehood, workers’ rights and healthcare for the islands.
“As elected leaders, we do not serve artificial entities,” Keohokalole said. “We serve the people, and now is the time for us to step up again and be the first state in the nation to act for them.”"
-- Hawai`i Free Press, "Hawaii Legislature passes first-in-nation bill targeting Citizens United ruling", May 10, 2026
What is the value of a value?
We believe that our government is for the people. We declare it in the Democratic Creed. We wrote it in the Preamble to our Constitution. We called it a self-evident truth in our Declaration of Independence. President Lincoln dedicated us to that at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. President Franklin Roosevelt said, “The first obligation of government is the protection of the welfare and well-being, indeed the very existence, of its citizens.”
“Government for the people” is a value we hold dearly. It is at the heart of all that we are committed to doing. And when someone - even a Supreme Court justice - chooses to make us a government of, by, and for corporations, they betray that value.
What is the value of a value? The value tells us when we’ve been betrayed. The value spurs us to act. The value obligates us to undo the wrongful decision and to restore our foundational, self-evident truth.
The value justifies the choice we make to fight the fight we must fight.
That’s value enough.
