James Marc Leas is a patent attorney and a past co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Palestine Subcommittee. On January 25, 2017, he posted The Supreme Court Supplied a Blueprint to Overcome "Citizens United" -- We Just Need to Use It. Perhaps not the best title, because we really don't expect anything decent to come out of SCOTUS. But Leas appears to have a very interesting and plausible argument, that just might be a way to counter the influence of money in USA elections, and begin to loosen the stranglehold various oligarchs now have on our political process.

One year after its decision in Citizens United, the US Supreme Court supplied a blueprint for canceling the dominance of the 1 percent over all levels of government that the Court had created with its decisions in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United.

In Nevada Commission on Ethics v. Carrigan (2011) the Court upheld a portion of Nevada's Ethics in Government Law that prohibits an elected official from voting or taking any other official action when faced with a real or apparent conflict of interest.

The case arose after a city council member in Sparks, Nevada voted to approve a casino that would hire his campaign manager as a "consultant." Complaints were filed with Nevada's Commission on Ethics, which investigated and then censured the council member. The Commission's censure was overturned by the Nevada Supreme Court, which based its decision on the now infamous majority ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. But when this Nevada case made its way to the US Supreme Court, something very interesting happened. SCOTUS overturned the Nevada Supreme Court in a unanimous decision.

Even more startling, the decision was written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who decided that a legislator voting is quite different than a legislator exercising their freedom of speech.

The Court thus held that "restrictions on legislators' voting are not restrictions on legislators' protected speech." It further said that "the procedures for voting in legislative assemblies ... pertain to legislators not as individuals but as political representatives executing the legislative process."

Justice Scalia also noted that "the legislator casts his vote 'as trustee for his constituents, not as a prerogative of personal power.' In this respect, voting by a legislator is different from voting by a citizen." Because "a legislator has no right to use official powers for expressive purposes" the court held that, unlike laws restricting election spending, legislative recusal rules do not violate the First Amendment, and the holdings in Buckley and Citizens United do not apply

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Leas points out that Scalia's ruling opens the door to making it illegal for law makers to vote on any matter that affects their financial contributors: "any state government, or even a local government, on its own, is free to prohibit elected officials from voting or taking official action on any matter which provides a conflict of interest, including payback to a major electioneering supporter. It should be obvious that this is a much less difficult task than trying to pass a Constitutional amendment that would eliminate Citizens United.

Leas goes on to quote the Nevada state law that was upheld by the SCOTUS decision in Nevada Commission on Ethics v. Carrigan, as well as some pertinent provision in the Vermont state constitution that whave been carried over from the original 1777 Vermont constitution. The excerpt Leas cites from the Nevada's Ethics in Government Law reads:

No member may vote upon any matter with respect to which the independence of judgment of a reasonable person in his or her situation would be materially affected by electioneering contributions or independent expenditures directly or indirectly from any one or more persons or entities that have a special pecuniary interest in the matter.

Leas stresses that this provision has already been upheld by the Robert Supreme Court, and all any state has to do to begin countering the effects of Citizens United is adopt a similar provision. And begin enforcing it.