Senator Al Franken (D-MN) blasted the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on the Senate floor on Tuesday, calling it the “worst” ruling in the history of the court.
“Citizens United was one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court,” Franken said. “It was a disaster.”
Sign Al Franken’s Petition, Today!
PUT CITIZENS UNITED IN THE DUMPSTER OF BAD IDEAS
On Monday, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to debate a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Citizens United ruling along with one other that limited limits on campaign spending.
Franken’s speech is the latest chapter in his ongoing war with those rulings. You can read a transcript below from his website, and you can also watch him speaking with Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday about Citizens United and the recent vote to open debate to overturn it by going to Al Franken Goes To War Against The Citizens United Ruling (VIDEO)
Sen. Franken’s Floor Statement on Constitutional Amendment to Overturn Citizens United
As Prepared for Delivery
M. President, I’m just gonna come out and say it: Citizens United was one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. It was a disaster – a radical exercise of pro-corporate judicial activism. It was seriously flawed, both legally and factually.
Legally, the Court trampled its own precedents – cases like Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. Federal Elections Commission, which had been on the books for years and stood for the obvious proposition that the people can enact reasonable limits on money in politics.
Factually, the Court rested its conclusions on the faultiest of premises – that unlimited campaign expenditures by outside groups, including corporations, do not give rise to corruption or even the appearance of corruption. That assessment is ridiculously disconnected from reality, and it is horribly out-of-touch with the sentiments of most Americans.
The Minnesota League of Women Voters issued a report in which it concluded that “the influence of money in politics represents a dangerous threat to the health of our democracy in Minnesota and nationally.” And I think that if you ask most people whether unlimited spending on campaigns has a corrupting effect, they’ll agree and say, yeah, of course it does – and I think they’d be right. But Citizens United was based on this unfounded – unbelievable – idea that we have no reason to be concerned about the effects of unlimited campaign spending.
So you have this 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that ignores the law and invents the facts, and here’s what you end up with as a result: a campaign finance system in tatters – one in which deep-pocketed corporations, super-wealthy individuals, and well-funded special interests can flood our elections with money, drowning out the voices of middle-class Americans who don’t have the luxury of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars – or millions of dollars – or hundreds of millions of dollars – to influence the political process.
This is real, M. President: spending by outside groups more than tripled from the 2008 presidential election to the 2012 presidential election, when it topped a billion dollars – that’s billion with a “b.” What happened in the interim? Well Citizens United was decided in 2010 – the floodgates were opened.
And, worse still, the middle-class isn’t just being flooded; it’s being blindfolded, too – because these wealthy special interest groups often can spend the money anonymously, so voters have no idea who’s behind the endless attack ads that fill the airwaves. Here’s how it works: if you have millions of dollars that you want to spend, you can funnel it through back channels so that it ends up in the hands of a group – typically one with a generic and benign-sounding name – that uses the money to buy ads, often without disclosing the source of its funds.
This whole thing looks to me a lot like money laundering – except that it’s now perfectly legal. And, again, this is real: a study just came out which showed that, in the current election cycle alone, there’s already been over 150,000 ads run by groups that don’t have to disclose the source of their funding.
And get this: things are only getting worse. Earlier this year, in a case called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court was at it again, recklessly doing away with a law that prohibited people from giving more than $123,000, in the aggregate, directly to candidates in an election cycle. One-hundred-and-twenty-three-thousand-dollars. Who has that kind of money lying around to spend on elections? The super-rich, maybe. But the middle class sure doesn’t. The folks I meet with in Minnesota – who are trying to make ends meet, pay off their student loans, train for a new job, save some money to start a family – they sure don’t. And those are the folks who most need a voice here in Washington.
You know, in June, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing on this, and we heard from a witness whose presentation I found particularly persuasive. I’d suggest that my colleagues read his testimony. He was a state senator from North Carolina, and here’s what he said:
Quote, “Suddenly, no matter what the race was, money came flooding in. Even elected officials who had been in office for decades told me they’d never seen anything like it. We were barraged by television ads that were uglier and less honest than I would have thought possible. And they all seemed to be coming from groups with names we had never even heard of. But it was clear that corporations and individuals who could write giants checks had a new level of power in the state,” end quote.
He went on to explain that the vast majority of outside money that was spent on state races, including the governor’s race, came from one man – just one man who reportedly poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into state politics. Before the governor was even sworn into office, he announced who would write the state’s budget – that same big donor. Apparently, the donor got his money’s worth: the budget he drafted was loaded up with goodies for corporate interests and the super-rich – provided at the expense of the middle class and working folks.
I find this whole thing incredibly disturbing, M. President – this idea that a handful of super-wealthy corporate interests can, in effect, buy our democracy. That’s just not how it’s supposed to work. In our democracy, everyone is supposed to have an equal say, regardless of his or her wealth. The guy on the assembly line gets as many votes as the CEO – one. You don’t get extra influence just because you have extra money. The government has to be responsive to everyone, not just to the wealthiest among us.
So the way I see it is this: there are two ways that we can go from here. On the one hand, we can continue to let Citizens Untied be the law of the land. We can perpetuate the fallacy that corporations have a constitutional right to flood our elections with undisclosed money; we can let deep-pocketed special interests buy influence and access – and then set the agenda for the rest of the country.
Or … Or, we can say, enough is enough. We can restore the law to what it was before Citizens United was decided – and, more to the point, we can restore a voice for millions upon millions of everyday Americans who want nothing more than to see their government represent them.
That’s the choice we have before us this week, M. President. For those of us who believe that the measure of a democracy’s strength is in votes cast, not dollars spent – for us, I think it’s an easy choice. I’m going to vote to reverse Citizens United, and I urge my colleagues to do the same. Thank you.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login