Laurence Tribe on what Congress can do in response to Citizens United

The always informative SCOTUS blog has an interesting piece on "What Should Congress Do about Citizens United?" written by Laurence Tribe, whose name is familiar to law students because he is the author of a leading treatise on Constitutional Law, and may be familiar to folks who were glued to the television during the Bush v. Gore election year 2000 drama. He points up the following approaches:

1. "Congress may legitimately act under the Commerce Clause to enhance the efficacy of each shareholder’s ability to ensure that his or her investment [in a corporation] is not deployed to advance or obstruct the election of particular candidates to federal (or, indeed, state) office contrary both to that shareholder’s own wishes and, more importantly in this context, to the corporation’s business interests."
2. "Federal legislation could ... build on the disclosure and disclaimer requirements that the Court upheld by an 8-1 vote in Citizens United, ... to include a statement by the corporate sponsor’s CEO, by name, providing information about how much of the corporation’s general treasury was  being expended in aggregate on the communication in question and certifying the CEO’s personal conclusion ... that making the [corporate] expenditure ... significantly advances the corporation’s business interest."
3. "[C]reat[e] a federal cause of action for corporate waste ... For example, it could provide a greater incentive for suit, by offering statutory damages or treble damages (i.e., reimbursement of three times the challenged expenditure, part of which reimbursement would go directly to the plaintiffs rather than into the corporation’s coffers), as well as attorneys’ fees, and it could provide better deterrence by imposing individual liability for the corporate officers authorizing the improper political expenditure."