Jeff Clements – former Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts and co-founder of Free Speech for People – will be at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord, MA at 7 p.m. Sept. 4 to discuss the impact of the Citizens United v FEC Supreme Court ruling on our democracy and kick off a national tour for his new book “Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations.”
In a recent op-ed for US News and World Report, Clements writes:
“The Supreme Court’s series of misguided 5-4 rulings such as Citizens United v. FEC has created special rights for “things,”such as money and corporations, while constricting the right of all people to be heard, to an equal vote, to representation and participation in self-government. And while billions of dollars of special interest money, often secret, flood our political process and corrupt our government, corporations from Hobby Lobby to Monsanto to Peabody Energy increasingly deploy the new “corporate veto” in the courts to skirt even the most basic public laws.
We can despair and give up on a government of, for and by the people. Or we can do what virtually every generation of Americans before us has done when we fall short of our promise of self-government – we can renew democracy with our power to amend the Constitution.”
The US Senate is schedule to vote on “The Democracy For All” (SJ RES 19) amendment on Sept. 8 2014. The amendment will grant Congress the authority to regulate campaign spending. The language distinguishes between natural persons and artificial entities like corporations and unions and will permit Congress to prohibit corporate and union political spending. So far, the amendment has 50 co-sponsors in the Senate and 117 co-sponsors in the House.
All the co-sponsors of the bill all Democrats. One can quickly infer that this is not a bipartisan measure, and as such it has little chance of being passed or of changing the terms of the discussion.
And if one does look at the details of the bill, it turns out this is nothing less than an attempt to amend the Constitution. Chances of achieving that are exactly zero.
Sadly, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this is designed to pretend that Democrats are concerned with campaign finance issues, when in reality they choose to overshoot the target by enough to keep the target safely untouched.
In reality Dems are just as bad as Repubs in respect to campaign finance. As much as it hurts me to say it, I see no difference between the two parties on this issue. Freshmen Dem congressmen, reportedly, are asked to spend 4 hours a day dialing for dollars, just to give one example.
Fixing campaign finance requires a fair amount of introspection, of being critical of one’s own party worst abuses, and of finding allies in the GOP willing to be critical of their own. It also requires the introduction of campaign transparency rules that neither party will find convenient, because neither party likes to have the rules of the game changed from under them while they are busy maximizing the cash raised under the existing rules.
The Mass Legislature just passed a great campaign finance transparency law. If the Capitol Hill was serious about campaign finance, they would start by using the Mass campaign finance bill as a model.
Let’s also be careful about conflating a couple of things. CU was about non-campaign entities spending their own money to explicitly advocate for candidates whereas previously they couldn’t say, “Don’t vote to re-elect Senator X”, but worked around it by saying, “Call Senator X and tell him you don’t like his vote on…” which just happened to air during campaign season. Members of Congress are raising money for themselves and Hill Committees, the contribution limits to which were not affected by CU.