Alfonso Saldaña entered political activism during the early years of the Obama administration, motivated by a sense of optimism for real change in healthcare reform, addressing economic inequality, and reducing corporate influence over politics.
“I was excited when he won,” he said. “I thought things were going to get fixed.”
It didn’t take Saldaña long to see how private interests would interfere with the same system issues he thought he was helping fix.
Years later, that reality hit close to home. A powerful explosion at a nearby SpaceX facility in Texas went largely underreported. Saldaña wasn’t surprised.
“They have the money to cover it up,” he said. “That’s what corporate personhood looks like.”
He is now co-director of Move to Amend, a national grassroots coalition formed in 2009 in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC. The group advocates for a constitutional amendment that would assert two key principles: that constitutional rights belong only to natural persons, and that political spending is not protected as a form of free speech.
The amendment, known in Congress as House Joint Resolution 54, has garnered more than 60 co-sponsors and has been endorsed by over 800 organizations nationwide. At the local level, over 725 municipalities have passed resolutions in support.
Amend's focus is structural. Rather than pursue campaign finance reforms through statute, the group is working to change the underlying legal framework that enables corporations and other entities to spend unlimited funds in elections.
“I realized that lasting change requires not just electing the right leaders but dismantling the systems that prevent progress,” Saldaña said. “Like corporate personhood and the flood of money in politics.”
His counterpart, co-director Jennie Spanos, came to the movement from a background in journalism. While reporting in northwest Florida during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, she witnessed firsthand the effects on her own community.
After the Citizens United ruling in 2010, she began volunteering with Move to Amend and later joined the national staff.
“A lot of people don’t recognize or realize that corporations have these alienable rights,” said Sopranos. “A win is when we go into a space that we haven’t been before, and they’ve already started understanding this issue.”
Amend's proposed language differs from other constitutional reform efforts in that it mandates, rather than permits, regulation of political spending. The amendment would also clarify that corporations and other artificial entities do not hold constitutional rights, a position the group argues is necessary to prevent future court rulings that further insulate private power.
Spanos said public support has grown significantly, backed by more than 800 organizational endorsers and over 500,000 petition signers mobilized in support of the amendment.
“Recently, organizations that have come on have not only endorsed the We the People amendment, but they have taken it on as part of their strategic plan to get it passed,” said Spanos.
She pointed to Veterans for Peace, an official endorser that now incorporates the issue of corporate power into its broader advocacy. In 2024, the group partnered with Move to Amend for a Walk to End Corporate Rule, linking their anti-war platform to the effort to confront the outsized influence of corporations in U.S. politics and policy.
While the organization operates with a small staff, it supports a nationwide network of volunteers. It employs a horizontal leadership model and consensus-based decision-making, reflecting the democratic values it seeks to promote.
Although Move to Amend has built momentum at the grassroots level, the group still faces institutional pushback. Spanos cited a court decision in Minnesota that upheld constitutional protections for corporations, even as advocates tried to restrict foreign influence in elections.
“There was a case in Minnesota about foreign spending, and the court said, well, these corporations have constitutional rights,” she said. “That’s why we need this amendment.”
As Move to Amend marks 15 years, its leaders emphasize that the campaign is about more than a single amendment. “It’s about political education and about connecting the dots,” Spanos said. “We’re talking about how power works.”
Both co-directors say the movement’s success depends on long-term public engagement. “It’s a marathon,” Spanos said. “Not a sprint.”
Angeles Ponpa is a graduate student at Northwestern Medill in the Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs specialization, and a Fulcrum summer intern.
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image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.