That's why Citizens United is a sham. Corporations are NOT people. If they were, they would see more consequences. But no one ever does.
Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that created Hillary: The Movie which was critical of Hillary Clinton. They wanted to distribute it shortly before the 2008 primaries. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations from using general funds for electioneering or speech that advocates for the election or defeat of a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election.
The Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from stopping an incorporated association from independently spending its own money for political advocacy of a candidate. To put it another way, if I can spend my money to advocate for or against a candidate, why can I not get together with some friends to pool our money and incorporate to do the same? If this had gone the other way would you be okay with a corporation being forbidden from releasing a video critical of Trump shortly before the 2024 election?
A candidate would simply go to any circuit court judge and get an injunction against the media company. If the media company did not comply, the judge would find the officers in contempt. Marshals would then arrest and throw the companies officers in jail indefinitely until they complied.
That's what you're asking for. It's genuinely stupid. I say this as someone that would declare a national emergency on day 1 of being elected just to have the Air Force turn most media company HQs into smoldering craters.
You really cracked this case wide open, Sherlock.
Every time SCOTUS makes a ruling, there are thousands of extremely talented activist lawyers that immediate begin working on legal strategies to further expand a ruling in ways they believe are favorable to their political ends. You have to understand, there are lawyers who focus on specific justices and study the idiosyncrasies of their rulings/philosophy so they can reverse-engineer legal outcomes as they desire.
In United States v. Jones, Ginsburg and Thomas ruled that attaching a GPS tracker to a car and monitoring it was a Fourth Amendment search. Thomas believes physically attaching the device is a property trespass and constitutes a search. Ginsburg believed prolonged GPS surveillance violates a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Even though Ginsburg and Thomas are polar opposites, if you understand how they rule, you can still get the outcome you want with the right case.
Say that I hold the political that the US should provide more humanitarian aid to Gaza. If I raise a bunch of money for this cause, can I use that money to make movies about the poor conditions in Gaza? Can I buy a full page in the New York Times with information about the crisis in Gaza? Can I use the money to run ads advocating my position on Gaza? Can I use the money to buy ads that support candidates that share my position on this issue?
This is basically what super PACs do. Of course I don't want it so that you can deliver a bunch of gold bars to a senator in exchange for their vote on a bill, but was illegal before citizens united and remains illegal after.
For me, I don't see how you can reasonably enforce some rule against using "money to influence politics" without also having some central entity that gets to police everyone's political speech, and that scares me.
We already have those. It's exactly why AIPAC keeps slipping through all legal boundaries.
Regardless, the idea here on how Hawaii (and potentially other states) going around this is very simple: they can spend on elections, but that doesn't mean the state needs to give them all their incentives.