Citizens United Must Die~ On January 21, 2010, our very future as a thriving society was cast into doubt. That’s the day the U.S. Supreme Court announced its tragically ludicrous ruling in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case. Moments after the court issued its decision, Public Citizen announced our campaign to overturn the ruling and prevent a wholesale corporate takeover of the noble American experiment in living democracy. As we near the midpoint of year four in the campaign — which is meeting with more success than I had dared hope for — I want to update you on all that we’re accomplishing together and all that still confronts us. Take a few minutes to read through the entirety of this update. I think you’ll finish even better informed about the threats to our democracy and the kind of electoral purgatory inflicted on us by Citizens United. I think you’ll be impressed by the quantity and quality of the work we’re doing to address those threats and secure our country’s redemption before it’s too late. And I think you’ll be inspired to double down on your commitment as part of Public Citizen to do whatever it takes to rescue democracy from the asphyxiating grip of billionaires and corporations. OK, let’s get started. And please stay with me — our campaign is covering so much ground, and making so much headway — that I want to give you more than just a snapshot. FIFTEEN GOING ON FIFTY Last week, a majority of members of both houses of Delaware’s legislature signed a letter urging the U.S. Congress to pass a constitutional amendment reversing Citizens United. Delaware joins Illinois, Maine and West Virginia — along with the District of Columbia — in formally calling for an amendment this year. To date, 15 states have joined the nationwide groundswell of support for an amendment. Why does it matter how many states call for an amendment? Ultimately, an amendment will have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. That’s 38. Four more and we’re halfway there. But before that, an amendment must be passed by a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the U.S. Congress. (More on that below.) And one of the most effective ways to show a state’s representatives and senators in Washington, D.C., that there is popular demand for an amendment is to pass a resolution back home. But even before that, an amendment must be something that people are talking about and fighting for in their daily lives. And the statewide campaigns that Public Citizen — along with local and national partner organizations — is instrumental in leading are engaging everyday citizens from New York to California, from Florida to Washington state, and all points in between. In New Hampshire and Oregon, the state legislatures are still in session. We have been organizing tirelessly in both and anticipate that before the end of the summer, they will become the 16th and 17th states to join the amendment movement. We have been working with supporters and allies in nine other states — Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas — that highlight our readiness and ability to carry the momentum into states where this kind of movement may be a tougher sell. State resolutions are challenging but achievable. Winning them demonstrates the breadth and depth of public outcry for an amendment more clearly than any other single tactic. And they feed other strategic priorities by facilitating state coalitions, giving organizational partners a concrete way to plug in, generating media coverage and putting pressure on members of Congress. CORRUPTION ON EVERY CORNER Like their counterparts at the federal level, state politicians have come under the thrall of corporate and billionaire backers. And in some ways, the disease of money in politics may be even more debilitating at the state level. We all expect a lot of money to be spent on races for the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. But $23 million in the New Hampshire gubernatorial race in 2012, where 80% of that record-breaking amount was spent by super PACs? Or $400,000 on four city council seats in Oklahoma City last fall, where a single super PAC tried to buy seats that pay an annual salary of $12,000? Corporate executives can do basic math. (Except, seemingly, when it comes to paying their fair share in taxes.) And they know that investments in election outcomes can pay for themselves many, many times over — both in access to officials and in pro-corporate policies. So the dark money flows. And, like junkies to a drug dealer, our politicians are desperately addicted. FULL DISCLOSURE At the time of the Citizens United ruling, nearly half the states had laws restricting corporate political spending. In an instant, five Supreme Court justices wiped out these popular and commonsense policies. They turned the corporate money valve fully to “ON” and broke off the lever. But Public Citizen has a few wrenches to throw in the works of regression. Not to mention a flashlight. Even though Citizens United prohibits states from limiting corporate political expenditures, states are allowed to require full disclosure of the money corporations spend trying to influence elections. A report from the Corporate Reform Coalition (a robust and effective network of more than 70 organizations spearheaded by Public Citizen) compiled examples of states working to limit corporate money in politics: Twenty-one states — Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin — changed their disclosure laws after Citizens United rendered their original laws unconstitutional. Alaska, California and North Carolina now require the names of the top contributors to be listed in any electioneering advertising. Iowa now requires a corporation’s board to approve its independent spending. Maryland now requires that shareholders be informed of corporate political spending directly. Connecticut — this might be my favorite — now requires that the chief executive officer appear in any ad paid for by a corporation. ONE BILLION, ONE VOTE The 2012 election results were misread by more than a few political pundits. They argued that because President Obama won and Democrats in general did better than expected, concerns over spending by corporate interests and billionaire individuals were overblown. No serious political operative or candidate shares that assessment. The last two national elections — and what we can reasonably predict going forward — underscore how comprehensively our democracy has already been undermined by Citizens United. And it’s only getting worse: Elections are more expensive than ever. At least $6 billion was spent by or on behalf of people running for president or Congress last fall. Candidates must devote more and more time to raising money from Big Business and the very wealthy, leaving precious little time for regular voters (or for actually doing what they’re elected to do if they win). Dark money by the hundreds of millions is rotting our elections like a swarm of termites disintegrating a house from the inside out. Voters don’t know which corporations are spending how much to reward their puppets and punish their opponents. In contrast to the presidential election, at the state and local level, big-money conservative interests were very successful in 2012. Republicans now control the entire executive and legislative branches of government in nearly half the states in the country. Citizens United is bringing back the robber barons of yesteryear. Led by casino magnate and billionaire-25-times-over Sheldon Adelson — along with the tied-for-sixth-richest-people-in-the-world Koch Brothers — the top 100 individual political spenders in 2012 accounted for almost three-fourths of all the money raised by super PACs. OUTSIDE AND OUTSIZED Two election cycles into the Citizens United era, things are even worse than we expected and are on course to deteriorate still further. The Supreme Court’s misguided ruling has sparked a surge in outside spending — by super PACs (like Karl Rove’s Crossroads outfits), Big Business associations (like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and dubious 501(c)(4) organizations: Outside spending is shattering records. Citizens United enabled an array of outside groups to raise and spend money like never before. A Public Citizen report found that outside spending in top Senate races was 12 times greater in 2012 than in 2006. Outside spending is starting to overtake candidate spending. Public Citizen reported that outside spending exceeded candidate spending in four of the 10 most expensive Senate races. A new age of extreme unaccountability has arrived. Outside spending shifts control from modestly accountable candidates and parties to dark-money shadow entities and super PACs funded by the super-rich. The trend lines for outside money are skyrocketing up. Big Business and the hyper-wealthy who backed losing Republican candidates in 2012 will just spend more next time. Furthermore, the super PACs and dark money groups are increasingly turning to lobbying. Here’s the conversation that’s going on behind closed doors on Capitol Hill: “Senator, we really think you should create a new corporate tax loophole. And, by the way, don’t forget that we have a super PAC ready to spend millions in the next election.” How do you think that plays out? We find ourselves in another kind of arms race — one in which plutocracy, rather than plutonium, could be our downfall. And if we don’t stop it, democracy’s destruction is assured. IN THE NEGATIVE Outside spending is overwhelmingly focused on negative advertising. Public Citizen found that more than 85% of unregulated independent expenditures made by the 15 biggest outside groups in the 2012 election cycle financed negative messages. More than 90% of the money spent by Karl Rove’s Crossroads and by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was directed against candidates, as was ALL of the money spent by the Obama-supporting Priorities USA Action. Voters are discouraged and alienated by the slew of negative ads aired by outside groups. Where candidates are somewhat deterred from running attack ads, because voters may hold them accountable for the tone of their campaign, outside groups are accountable to nobody other than their handful of funders and therefore are not deterred at all. The reality is that negative advertising works, but it does so largely by turning people off to politics and the electoral process altogether. PIPE DREAM TO MAINSTREAM The public remains outraged by Citizens United, and that outrage was stoked further by the 2012 elections. Polls show that more than 80% of Americans disagree with the court’s ruling. And nearly nine in ten believe that corporations have too much power. This outrage has translated into more than 2 million signatures on petitions calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, with more added every day. The coalition of groups working for an amendment has grown from 60 organizations last year to more than 150 today, representing a spectrum of civil rights, community, environmental, labor and student groups, and many more — with Public Citizen among those at the forefront. Some 500 cities and towns throughout the entire country have passed resolutions calling for an amendment. And even President Obama has endorsed an amendment. HALFWAY HOUSE As I noted above, a key step on the path to an amendment is getting support from two-thirds of the members of each house of Congress. That would be 290 representatives and 67 senators. We already have 109 representatives and 29 senators. With 36 more representatives and 5 more senators, we’ll be halfway to that two-thirds threshold. We’re going to concentrate our efforts over the second half of 2013 on maximizing congressional momentum for an amendment. At Public Citizen, we have more than a dozen staff and a platoon of interns working on money-in-politics issues. Ours is one of the largest national teams committed to the campaign for a constitutional amendment of any organization. This allows us to lead in facilitating collaboration and building coalitions — and to do more work on Capitol Hill. Every elected official must answer this question: Do you support overturning Citizens United and fixing our broken campaign finance system or not? The intense legislative battles over getting the needed two-thirds of each chamber are beginning to heat up. UNIQUELY QUALIFIED For four decades, Public Citizen has been working to shield our political system from the corrosive effects of corporate money. Through our legal advocacy, research, policy analysis, communications work, public education, grassroots mobilizing and online organizing, we’ve been centrally involved in every major battle over campaign finance law and ethics reform. As we considered a constitutional amendment in advance of the Citizens United ruling, an explicit and significant factor in our thinking was a belief that pushing for an amendment would have positive outcomes even if we did not ultimately win one. Our operating theory — and it is proving sound — was that mobilizing around an amendment would generate much more energy than other remedies, and that all that energy would help advance those other remedies. Our constitutional amendment initiative is Public Citizen’s signature campaign. But when it comes to reform, we’re active on many fronts: We’re leading a coalition effort to generate public comments urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to require that publicly traded corporations disclose their political spending. So far, the agency has received some 600,000 citizen comments — three times as many as it had ever received before on any issue. We’re pushing, at the federal and state levels, for rules to require corporations to obtain approval from shareholders before making campaign expenditures. We’re advocating for laws to prevent “pay to play” campaign spending by government contractors. We’re preparing a brief for another potentially disastrous case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, that the Supreme Court will decide next year. We’re continuing to conduct our innovative, solid research through authoritative reports that garner extensive media coverage. We’re maintaining pressure for public financing of elections. We’re taking on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce directly with our U.S. Chamber Watch program. Just two weeks ago, we submitted more than 300,000 signatures (gathered by us and allies) to Google on a petition urging the company to cancel its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And we’re responding to IRS inconsistencies regarding 501(c) organizations with our Bright Lines Project, which aims to clarify and simplify the method by which the agency determines what political activity is restricted for those organizations. THAT’LL DO FOR NOW~
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:36:55 +0000
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