Why It's Delusional to Think a Campaign for a Constitutional Amendment Can End Citizens United

[KoKo]

I have great sadness to post this ...Because I've signed Petitions, Donated and Believed in our Democratic Organizations and their Efforts for Years. There's much here in this post that should alert our Progressive Dems and DU'ers that we need to FIND A BETTER WAY. The article points out where we've gone wrong...yet doesn't say how to fix it ..except to elect "More and Better Dems" and hope for a Better "Supreme Court" in the future....(way out future) before our Problems can be Resolved.

I think there are better ways...more Creative Ways and Ways that have already been proposed that bypass our Left Organizations who often want Money & Influence to fill their Pockets rather than REAL REFORM.

I post this because it reveals a history of BETRAYAL..and if one is a Dem who is horrified by the events we've now lived through for DECADES then this is a WAKE UP CALL.

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THE ARTICLE....and it's WELL WORTH THE READ:


Why It's Delusional to Think a Campaign for a Constitutional Amendment Can End Citizens United
Citizens United has delivered our democracy to billionaires. But there's a danger in pushing reform that won't work.

September 8, 2014 |


The three-plus-year push for a constitutional amendment on money and politics, leading to a bill sponsored by Senator Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, ended with a predictable thud in the Senate Thursday morning when 54 senators, including all Democrats, voted for it, and all 42 Republicans voted against it. Since two-thirds of the Senate is necessary to pass an amendment, and no Republicans indicated any interest, it never had a chance.

The push for the 28th Amendment was a desperate reaction to the latest series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have unleashed an unprecedented flood of secret money into American elections. As Steven Rosenfeld reported, super-donors have more power and influence than ever, thanks to many court decisions leading up to Citizens United. In response, a huge campaign by dozens of liberal advocacy groups and a relentless Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) garnered more than 1.5 million online signatures to line up votes for a 28th Amendment in the hope it would pass a first hurdle in a long, virtually impossible path. In other words, given today’s hyper-partisan political landscape, the biggest effort to engage federal lawmakers on the topic of rescuing American democracy was fated to fail.

On Monday, it was first thought Senate Republicans would prevent debate, which would have killed the amendment on the spot, since five Republican votes were needed to begin debate and break a filibuster. But then some members of the GOP saw utility in allowing the debate to advance to score some points. The vote to open debate was 79-18 and immediately seized by groups like MoveOn.org and DCCC, and hyped as a harbinger of big progress, but that was far from true. When Laurence O’Donnell shared his delight on his MSNBC show that night, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken, had to break the spell and tell him sorry, but this is all a maneuver by those sneaky Republicans to run down the clock to prevent any progress on issues like minimum wage before a recess.

So by Thursday, the charade ended. The sporadic debate interrupted by lack of quorum, and by more compelling issues like the militarization of the police and the ISIL foreign crisis crawled to a halt and the amendment fell 13 votes short. The predictable failure of this effort—along with the fact that constitutional amendments on campaign finance have been debated four times in the Senate dating back to 1987 and all have failed (even though in the past they attracted some Republican votes)—suggests it's time to step back and ask some hard questions.

Is the amendment route the smartest approach? Is it the only pathway to political reform? Has it helped build a progressive movement? Or was it bumper-sticker politics, and primarily Internet clicktivism, that deluded many reformers and didn’t threaten America’s wealthy political insiders in any serious way?

The Push For the Amendment

The U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign finance, usually referred to in shorthand as overturning Citizens United, really freaked many people out. As predicted, the Supreme Court's (SCOTUS) rulings have led the political culture to run further amok with super-rich donors dominating the process as never before. Even though there has been a long history of SCOTUS voting to treat money as speech, the Roberts Court’s decisions seemed over the top—especially by narrowing the definitions of political corruption. They reinforced the sense that American democracy belongs to the few, leaving many citizens feeling alienated from the political process and concluding there’s not much anyone can do. And that big question remains: what can people do?

A national push for a constitutional amendment was what some people thought should happen. On Monday, a bill from Sen. Udall made it to the floor that would restore the authority of Congress, individual states and the American people to regulate campaign finance, the New Mexico Democrat's website explained. And it would clarify in the Constitution that money does not equal speech, effectively reversing Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1970s that have increased the power and influence of wealthy donors.

MUCH MORE AT THE SITE...for THIS WEEKEND READ:

http://www.alternet.org/activism/why-its-delusional-think-campaign-constitutional-amendment-can-end-citizens-united