Halloween is a season of pranks and mischief (and, if you live in Detroit, fascinatingly creative arson as well). Some kids toilet-paper cars and trees. In Chicago we smash pumpkins, which also explains that screeching voice you heard on the radio during the ’90s. I’m sure in Utah the Mormon kids just go door-to-door actually handing candy back to their adult neighbors. Every region has its tradition of seasonal nonsense, and it’s fascinating to see how each has evolved separately.

Which is why I enjoyed discovering the other night via Senator Josh Hawley that either the actual state of Missouri or the present state of Washington, D.C., Trump-era politics has chosen to mark Halloween by egging America’s garage door with insultingly pointless legislative pandering. Yes, Hawley was out there on Mischief Night with news of his intent to introduce a bill in the Senate overturning Citizens United v. FEC, the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision that (correctly, in my view) found that corporations, as associations of citizens, have the same right to donate to election campaigns or make political statements that individuals do.

This is obviously a publicity stunt rather than a serious attempt to legislate; Hawley has desperately been seeking a public-relations face lift ever since his disgraceful nadir on January 6, 2021, hence his attempts to change the subject to something “populist”-sounding instead. Procedurally it’s a dead letter in a Democratic Senate and a rickety Republican House, and it would be insulting to readers to explain why in plodding detail. It is impossible to evaluate the constitutionality of Hawley’s legislation in any specificity without a copy of the proposed text, but I daresay that the Supreme Court would look askance at any attempt to limit its holding on the nature of constitutionally protected political speech via legislation rather than an actual amendment. (Call it a hunch.)

So this is going nowhere fast. It is meant to stake a flag for Josh Hawley’s political brand. In that sense it is no more or less disappointing than the behavior of at least 80 other legislators on Capitol Hill, but a Harvard Law–educated former Supreme Court clerk (for John Roberts, no less) surely ought to know better than to muster, as legal justification, little more than “yes but you see, I disagree with the Court.” (Hawley pronounces himself an “originalist,” but given his desire to simply overrule the Court by legislative fiat, perhaps he’s one of those “originalists” who occasionally forgets about Marbury v. Madison. Scalia would shake his head.)

What makes it all feel sleazier than your typical base-pleasing populist play — “congressional term limits” is a hardy chestnut of this genre, as both safely unconstitutional yet extremely popular — is the naked instrumentalism behind it. Citizens United was hailed at the time as a key achievement of the early Roberts Court (few remember that the case was about an anti–Hillary Clinton documentary that a conservative activist group wanted to air on cable TV as a paid advertisement), but as Hawley constantly observes, the infiltration of an entire generation of young adults out of the academy has turned almost all corporate political messaging into a “woke” monoculture instead. And as they push their politico-cultural messages, people like Hawley reason, so culture moves. (Counterpoint: not always.)

There is much to deplore about the present state of “woke capital.” (I don’t like this term, but until a better catch-all for the phenomenon we’re discussing exists, we’re stuck with it.) But Hawley’s response is both illiterate as a matter of constitutional interpretation and immoral as an act of using the federal government to restrict the speech of those he perceives as his enemies. Hawley himself cynically revealed his true motivations when reporter Philip Wegmann, interviewing him for RealClearPolitics in the piece cited above, pressed him on the point: “Would Hawley still seek to muzzle corporations if the content of their speech was different, though? ‘Well, actions do have consequences,’ the senator replied.” In other words, had corporations either turned to the right, remained in the center, or simply fallen judiciously silent altogether, he would see no need for consequences. Hawley’s problem is that they are speaking, and he doesn’t like what it is they’re saying. I don’t either, but that is a problem whose solution cannot be found by merely applying a muzzle to it, constitutionally or otherwise.