Dodd introduces constitutional amendment to reverse SCOTUS on campaign spending

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/83469-dodd-introduces-constitutional-amendment-to-reverse-scotus-on-campaign-spending

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) introduced a constitutional amendment today to overrule a recent Supreme Court decision on campaign spending.

The court ruled 5-4 last month in Citizens United v. FEC that Congress cannot regulate independent expenditures by corporations and possibly labor unions. The ruling could dramatically increase third party spending on elections.

Dodd's amendment, co-sponsored by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) would explicitly grant Congress the authority to regulate campaign fundraising and expenditures for federal elections.

The amendment would also let states regular such activity in their own elections.

"I strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s conclusion that money is speech, and that corporations should be treated the same as individual Americans when it comes to protected, fundamental speech rights,” Dodd said in a statement.


More at the link above --

...:applause:

KNR

I doubt you will find 288 votes in the house. Then we need only 38 states to ratify.

Good luck.

Good luck with that on the next election.

Who I choose to donate to is a form of expression.

However, corporate personhood is fair game.

Anyone have the text of the amendment handy?

:shrug:

good question.

I think.

Such is the definition of bribery. No campaign reform law will get rid of the 'squeaky wheel gets the grease' syndrome.

There's no fair way to keep one candidate from being able to outspend another. Even in an egalitarian system without any corporate money, the more popular candidate will be able to outspend the other(s).

Any system that limits the amount of money a candidate can spend, or provides money for the less popular candidates- all that does is dilute the whole political process down to a mediocracy.

Yeah, it sucks when you're the candidate or party being outspent, but when the shoe's on the other foot, and your popular candidate is having to meet the same standard as the wingnut, or the wingnut's getting public money to spew his/her garbage, it won't feel quite so fair.

The Amendment is for allowing Congress to regulate corporate campaign spending? Let's just f'ing ban it!

K&R any way.

:kick:

We're not going to be able to do much more than one amendment I think, if any at all. And the real problem at the core of the recent SCOTUS decision, and so many others as well, is the concept of "corporate personhood". If we could get rid of that, this decision would be made moot, and we could also put in place *MANDATORY* public campaign financing (corporations would no longer have unbridled "rights" of free speech), and quite a few other things.

Dodd's heart is in the right spot, but something like this might get thrown out by this court who might try to rationalize that it would violate the corporation's rights to free speech (based on "corporate personhood rights"), and we'd be back at square one again, even if it passed. But clarifying and defining an amendment that would say that corporations are NOT persons would attack the problem at the source, and there's nothing the court could do (the constitution, etc.) to fight this.

.. the Constitutional Amendment that really needs done, is much simpler and solves MANY problems, not just one. It should read something like this:

Be it hereby known to all, in regards to all Rights granted to Persons in this Constitution, only living, breathing, flesh and blood human beings shall be considered Persons. No organization or corporation, public or private shall be considered to be a Person, for any purpose of being granted those Rights reserved solely to Individuals.

Dodd is my Senator. I want him to do some things for us, his voters, before he leaves. He has disappointed me at times. But this is a good start.

Hope they get this pushed through.