by John Nichols
Members of the House and Senate are on their annual spring break. And, this being an election year, the vast majority of them are heading home to their districts to “listen” to the voters.
This year, they’ll get an earful — from constituents who may still be debating about the scope and character of health-care reform but who (according to every poll) are remarkably united in their support of job-creation projects and a “bust-the-banksters” approach to financial services reform.
Members of Congress who claim to be serious about any of these important issues need to be asked a question: “Have you signed on as a co-sponor of legislation that would amend to the U.S. Constitution in order to assure that corporations do not control our elections and our policy making?”
Chief Justice John Roberts and his Supreme Court cabal trashed the original intent of the framers, the laws of the land and a century of judicial precedent to issue a lawless ruling in the case of Citizens United v. FEC. That ruling removed even minimal limits of the ability of corporations, with their vast resources and focused agendas, to buy elections and to set the legislation agenda for the nation.
[Read more]
Campaign finance reformers are still reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which threw open the doors to big-bucks corporate campaigns for candidates.
But in North Carolina, it’s still a good year for those who worry that political positions are available to the highest bidder. Because here, at least one piece of reform is working better than even its ardent advocates may have hoped.
This year will see the first state election when every appellate judicial candidate has chosen the public-finance option. All 11 candidates in contested races for Court of Appeals and Supreme Court have agreed to take public financing for their campaigns and will abide by stringent rules about fundraising and campaign spending.
[Read more]
by Chisun Lee
The Supreme Court recently freed [1] corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won’t know it, because it’s easy for them to legally hide their political spending.
Under current disclosure laws for federal elections, it’s virtually impossible for the public to track how much a business spends, what it’s spending on, or who ultimately benefits. Experts say the transparency problem extends to state and local races as well.
“There is no good way to gauge” how much any given company spends on elections, said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to the Center for Political Accountability. “There’s no central collection of the information, no monitoring.”
[Read more]
by John Nichols
Doris “Granny D” Haddock, whose 3,200-mile walk across the United States at the age of 90 drew thousands of activists into the movement for political reform, has died Tuesday evening at the age of 100.
The Dublin, New Hampshire, grandmother’s death came ten years and ten days after she finished the remarkable two-year walk, which she undertook to promote the passage of campaign finance reform legislation (in particular the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform law).
[Read more]
Should a court case on whether Washington state must disclose the identities of people calling for a referendum affect the kinds of disclosure required under campaign finance law? We say no. The explanation of our answer is the focus of an amicus brief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court by the Sunlight Foundation, the Brennan Center, and the Center for Responsive Politics in Doe v. Reed.
We believe that, regardless of whether the names of people who signed a petition calling for a referendum must be disclosed, the question of money in politics is different from other election regulation issues, and must be treated differently. “Where money is spent to influence the outcome of elections, vigilance is required to ensure that influence-peddling does not corrupt our democracy and that voters are empowered to make informed decisions about how such spending may have influenced their candidates and laws.”
[Read more]