Citizens United and the 19th Amendment

[xchrom]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13066/citizens_united_and_the_19th_amendment/

When the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision in January 2010, President Obama described it as “devastating to the public interest” and promised that he would work to “repair the damage that has been done.” It was supposed to be among his top priorities.

If working to reverse Citizens United has been one of Obama’s priorities, though, it’s been a well-kept secret. He rarely mentions it, and in February he reversed himself and decided accept funding from a Super PAC that’s raising money for his election campaign. (Citizens United allows Super PACs – or “political action committees” – to raise unlimited cash contributions from individuals, almost always on behalf of a particular candidate or cause.)

But in truth, the momentum for reversing Citizens United was never going to come from the White House, much less from Congress. Both are too deeply enmeshed in the system to invest much effort in reforming it. The energy to defeat the ruling will come, if it comes from anywhere, from old-fashioned grassroots activism. And on that front, the outlook is more promising than you might guess. There’s good news and bad news, and some more good news.

The first piece of good news is that Citizens United isn’t a partisan issue: a substantial majority of voters favor imposing limits on the influence of money and lobbyists in American politics. In a poll (PDF) released in January by the firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, 55 percent of respondents said that corporations should not have the constitutional rights accorded to individuals. Eighty percent favored limiting campaign contributions and spending, and 89 percent of independent voters favored “reasonable limits.” Two-thirds of the latter group said that “campaign finance reform is a very important factor in their vote.” The same was true for 69 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans.

[Jefferson23]

1. Sanity prevails in opinion..thank goodness. n/t