A constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United?
Wish I’d had more time to write about all the ways Citizens United is not about free speech. Maybe you can help me out here with your comments?
Politico Arena asks:
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has introduced a constitutional amendment aimed at overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision on campaign finance. The amendment would also overturn a Supreme Court decision that struck down an Arizona law that allowed public financing of a candidate if their opponent exceeded certain spending limits.
Is this a good idea? Or would it be the first constitutional amendment since the 18th, allowing for prohibition of alcohol, which would restrict freedoms and liberties rather than enhance them – in this case free speech?
My Response:
Money certainly does talk. Citizens United may be promoted as free speech by folks like the Koch brothers and corporations masquerading as people, but in truth the decision silences most Americans. It should be overturned. That can only happen through federal legislation or a Constitutional amendment.
Schiff’s proposed amendment gets the public debate started at the highest level of democratic discourse, and that’s where it should be.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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Even the founding fathers, who created a republic where only men of means could vote, would recoil in horror at what has happened to their grand experiment. There used to be strict limits on corporations, for very good reasons. All that has gone out the window, and now this is a government by, for, and of corporate power. Why corporations are allowed to have any influence over politics whatsoever is beyond me. That used to be considered corruption, by definition, and it has perverted both democracy and free enterprise to the point neither deserves the name.