JUNEAU -- A House committee added a ban on foreign campaign contributions Tuesday to a bill designed to counter some of the effects of a Supreme Court decision that freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited money on elections.

After a series of amendments, including the one on foreign-owned companies and another that banned all anonymous election advertising, the House State Affairs Committee approved the bill without objection and sent it to the House Judiciary Committee for further action.

A companion Senate bill had a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee Monday but wasn't moved. Chairman Hollis French, D-Anchorage, said he'd move the bill "soon," but its next stop would be the Senate Finance Committee, where bills have been stacking up.

The Senate Finance Committee stop was made necessary when the Alaska Public Offices Commission said it would cost $131,000 to implement the bill in its first year, in part because a new staffer would need to be hired to track corporate spending and reporting.

In a landmark 5-4 decision in January, the U.S. Supreme Court said long-standing bans on corporate and union election spending were violations of the First Amendment. The justices limited their ruling to so-called "independent expenditures." They said corporations and unions could spend freely for or against a candidate or ballot issue, but allowed to stand a federal law -- and by extension, those in states like Alaska -- that bars direct contributions to candidates themselves.

Because all corporate contributions had been banned by state law, Alaska has no legal framework to regulate even independent donations, unlike the strict limits and disclosure rules it imposes on individuals and political action committees. The House and Senate responded with bills requiring corporations and unions to report to the Public Offices Commission when they spend money on elections and to disclose their identities in advertising.

While the bills would regulate traditional companies and unions, the measures also target entities created mainly to influence voters. Two that Alaskans might remember from the 2008 ballot issue over the proposed Pebble Mine were Americans for Job Security and Alaskans Against the Mining Shutdown.

Both House and Senate bills would require those kinds of organizations to report contributors of more than $100. The Senate version would additionally require those groups to disclose their top five contributors in all advertising. The House had a similar provision, but Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, said applying that rule to broadcast audio would make election commercials sound like a "Cal Worthington" ad -- a rapid-fire disclaimer that could still take as much as 15 seconds of a 30-second commercial.

"It's a like a machine gun," he said.

Rep. Max Gruenberg, D-Anchorage, offered an amendment reducing the disclosure to the top three contributors, which passed. That shortened list initially applied just to a radio ad or the audio portion of a television commercial, but the committee chose to make it consistent for all advertising on a motion by Rep. Paul Seaton, R-Homer.