Teddy Roosevelt was right-- http://www.MovetoAmend.org ; on WHVW 950 AM in a.m.!...

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Joel Tyner

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Jan 22, 2010, 11:26:30 PM1/22/10
to Real Majority Project

"All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law."

-- Teddy Roosevelt

"I hope we shall...crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country."

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Logan, November 12, 1816

"The Supreme Court just predetermined the winners of next November's elections.  It won't be Republicans.  It won't be Democrats.  It will be corporate America."

-- Chuck Schumer [yesterday in rare populist moment]

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Hi all...

First-- you own the airwaves for two hours tomorrow (Saturday) morning, folks-- from 8 to 10 am!...on WHVW 950 AM http://www.whvw.net -- call in to be on the air with me, Rich C. at 483-9489!...

[...and please let us know if you can join Hudson Valley Clean Energy and The Pines in sponsoring!...]

Second-- more to the point-- what do all of the following noted progressive folks have in common?...

[note-- thx much to Rhinebeck's David Gideon for cluing me into this nascent movement!]

They've all signed on to start (along with 24,000 others in 2 days) http://www.MovetoAmend.org !...

[sign on today!...you'll be glad you did...and let EVERYone else you know on your list you did too]

Bill McKibben, founder, 350.org
David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World
David Swanson, AfterDowningStreet.org
Howard Zinn, historian
Jeff Cohen, founder, FAIR
Jim Hightower, author, columnist, and radio commentator
Mark Crispin Miller, author, Fooled Again
Matt Rothschild, Editor, The Progressive
Medea Benjamin, co-founder, Code Pink
Michael Albert, Z Communications
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Community
Rep. Michael Fisher, House of Representatives, Vermont
Riki Ott, Executive Director, Ultimate Civics
Robert McChesney, professor, co-author, The Death & Life of American Journalism
Thom Hartmann, nation's #1 nationally syndicated progressive talk show host
Tiffiniy Cheng, Executive Director, A New Way Forward
Tim Carpenter, Executive Director, Progressive Democrats of America
Tom Hayden, activist
Ward Morehouse, chair, National Lawyers Guild's Committee on Corporations


"We the corporations"

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.

We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

* Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

* Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.

* Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.


See these six for much more on this...(like Rich C. said earlier today on WVKR, steps towards fascism):

"Teddy Roosevelt Was Right: Ban ALL Corporate Contributions" by John Nichols

"Shed a Tear for Our Democracy" by Robert Weissman

"Whose Rights'?" by Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil

"At Last! SCOTUS Finally Allows Corporations to Influence US Politics" by Juell Stewart

Democracy Now: "In Campaign Finance Ruling, Limits Removed on Corporate Campaign Spending"

"Corporate Personhood Should Be Banned, Once and For all" by Ralph Nader

...and if you haven't seen these two yet, they're must-read's as well!...

"Obama's Half-Baked Bank Reform; For Real Reform, Bring Back Glass-Steagall" by Nomi Prins

"Casting Doubt on US Claims of Suicide, Attorney Scott Horton Reveals 3 Gitmo Prisoners Died After Torture at Secret Site"

Don't forget to let your fingers do the walking Monday a.m.-- call Congress: (800) 828-0498!...

[pass it on]

Joel
242-3571/876-2488

[anyone else out there interested in helping me to get my colleagues in our County Legislature (at least Dem ones) signed on to letter to Congress on this?...and/or getting our county Dem committee to pass similar resolution?...let me know, folks!...(and email us all-- at countyle...@co.dutchess.ny.us!)]

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Teddy Roosevelt Was Right: Ban ALL Corporate Contributions
posted by JOHN NICHOLS on 01/22/2010 @ 01:23am


What to do about the decision by U.S. Supreme Court to -- in the words of Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold -- "(ignore) important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent" in order to make corporations the dominant players in American politics?
Of course, there will be legislative scrambling at the local, state and federal levels. The decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and four other justices to reject history and precedent in order to put a radical pro-corporate spin on the First Amendment throws into question rules designed to regulate even the worst campaign abuses by business interests.

Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who leant his name to the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, will be working overtime to defend not just the progress he has made as a reformer but a century of clean-government legislation.

"It is important to note that the decision does not affect McCain-Feingold's soft money ban, which will continue to prevent corporate contributions to the political parties from corrupting the political process. But this decision was a terrible mistake," says the Wisconsin senator. "Presented with a relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was president. Ignoring important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent, the Court has given corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns. Just six years ago, the Court said that the prohibition on corporations and unions dipping into their treasuries to influence campaigns was 'firmly embedded in our law.' Yet this Court has just upended that prohibition, and a century's worth of campaign finance law designed to stem corruption in government. The American people will pay dearly for this decision when, more than ever, their voices are drowned out by corporate spending in our federal elections. In the coming weeks, I will work with my colleagues to pass legislation restoring as many of the critical restraints on corporate control of our elections as possible."

When all is said and done, however, that may not be enough.

It may be that the United States Constitution will need to be amended in order to restore to the Teddy Roosevelt principle:

"All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law," said Roosevelt in the first years of the 20th century, when he was also proposing public financing of federal election.

The court's ruling in the case of Citizens United v. FEC is a game-changer that, in the words of Feingold says corporations "can just open their treasuries (and) completely buy up all the television time, and drown out everyone else's voices."
There's a small measure of nuance in the ruling.

In their 5-4 decision, the majority maintained restrictions on direct donations by corporations to candidates and political parties.

But corporations - with their immense resources and their immense desire to influence the political and governing processes - will be able to spend as freely as their like (on television commercials and other forms of communication) to secure the election results they seek.
It's a recipe for democratic disaster, as wealth and power will define the debate that sets the parameters of our politics.

Says Senator Charles Schumer, D-New York: "The Supreme Court just predetermined the winners of next November's elections. It won't be Republicans. It won't be Democrats. It will be corporate America."

To paraphrase a particular television network, there will be no fairness and no balance.
That threat demands a response sufficient to the challenge it poses to electoral democracy. As Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, says: "We cannot just wring our hands, in my view, and let this stand. There is a great deal of work to be done."

Graves, a lawyer with long experience in both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, offers a savvy analysis of the motivations behind the court's ruling.
"When I worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee reviewing President George W. Bush's judicial nominees and their agendas, I feared this day would come. That's why I tried to help keep John Roberts off the appellate court, and then was so saddened the day he was appointed and when I saw President Bush promote him to become Chief Justice after I had left the government," she says. "In reading the biographies, writings, and speeches of right-wing nominees, it became clear to me that a revolution in the law was being fomented to undermine the power of ordinary people to regulate corporations in their communities.

Today's decision is a huge gift to corporations from a Supreme Court that has been radicalized by right-wing ideology, whose political agenda was made obvious in the Bush v. Gore case and whose very political decision today only makes things worse. I think we have to rebuke the Court's arrogant decision and make sure the law puts Americans before corporations."

There will be talk of legislative interventions, the best of which is almost certainly rapid passage of the Fair Elections Now Act, which would set up a system of public financing of elections.

"This would establish citizen-funded elections," says Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig.

But there are a number of reformers who fear that any legislative initiative will be made difficult by the high court's misinterpretation of the first amendment to read: whoever has the most money gets the most free speech.

That stranglehold on real democracy may, in the view of these activists, only be broken by a constitutional amendment, and democracy and clean government campaigners are proposing just that - with some suggesting the traditional route of having Congress propose an amendment, while others imagine asking legislatures across the country to call a constitutional convention to develop an amendment.

Graves and others are backing a Move to Amend campaign, which debuted a website for activists moments after the court ruling came down.

The Move to Amend coalition declares:

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.

We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

1. Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
2. Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
3. Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.
Within hours of the decision, more than 3,500 Americans had signed on as backers of this particular initiative.

Whatever the specific route, and whatever the specific language (Graves suggests: "No corporation shall be considered to be a person who is permitted to raise or spend money on federal, state, or local elections of any kind"), the goal of any amendment strategy should be to enshrine in the Constitution of this land the fundamental democratic principle proposed more than a century ago by a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt: "All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law."

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Published on Thursday, January 21, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Corporate Personhood Should Be Banned, Once and For All
Outrageous SCOTUS Decision Should Reignite Most Necessary of Debates
by Ralph Nader

Today's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process. It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations. With this decision, corporations can now also draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars.
This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics. It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters. It is way overdue to overthrow "King Corporation" and restore the sovereignty of "We the People"!
 
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel -  is, Only The Super Wealthy Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.
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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/22-14 ...

Published on Friday, January 22, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Shed a Tear for Our Democracy
by Robert Weissman

Yesterday, in the case Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence election outcomes.
Money from Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer and the rest of the Fortune 500 is already corroding the policy making process in Washington, state capitals and city halls. Now, the Supreme Court tells these corporate giants that they have a constitutional right to trample our democracy.

In eviscerating longstanding rules prohibiting corporations from using their own monies to influence elections, the court invites giant corporations to open up their treasuries to buy election outcomes. Corporations are sure to accept the invitation.

The predictable result will be corporate money flooding the election process; huge targeted campaigns by corporations and their front groups attacking principled candidates who challenge parochial corporate interests; and a chilling effect on candidates and election officials, who will be deterred from advocating and implementing policies that advance the public interest but injure deep-pocket corporations.

Because the decision is made on First Amendment constitutional grounds, the impact will be felt not only at the federal level, but in the states and localities, including in state judicial elections.
In one sense, the decision was a long time in coming. Over the past 30 years, the Supreme Court has created and steadily expanded the First Amendment protections that it has afforded for-profit corporations.

But in another sense, the decision is a startling break from Supreme Court tradition. Even as it has mistakenly equated money with speech in the political context, the court has long upheld regulations on corporate spending in the electoral context. The Citizens United decision is also an astonishing overreach by the court. No one thought the issue of corporations' purported right to spend money to influence election outcomes was at stake in this case until the Supreme Court so decreed. The case had been argued in lower courts, and was originally argued before the Supreme Court, on narrow grounds related to application of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

The court has invented the idea that corporations have First Amendment rights to influence election outcomes out of whole cloth. There is surely no originalist interpretation to support this outcome, since the court created the rights only in recent decades. Nor can the outcome be justified in light of the underlying purpose and spirit of the First Amendment. Corporations are state-created entities, not real people. They do not have expressive interests like humans; and, unlike humans, they are uniquely motivated by a singular focus on their economic bottom line. Corporate spending on elections defeats rather than advances the democratic thrust of the First Amendment.

We, the People cannot allow this decision to go unchallenged. We, the People cannot allow corporations to take control of our democracy.

There are some things that can be done to mitigate the damage from today's decision.
First, we must have public financing of elections. Public financing will give independent candidates a base from which they may be able to compete against candidates benefiting from corporate expenditures. We will intensify our efforts to win rapid passage of the Fair Elections Now Act, which would provide congressional candidates with an alternative to corporate-funded campaigns before fundraising for the 2010 election is in full swing. Sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, and Rep. John Larson, D-Connecticut, the bill would encourage unlimited small-dollar donations from individuals and provide candidates with public funding in exchange for refusing corporate contributions or private contributions in amounts of more than $100. The proposal has broad support, including more than 126 co-sponsors in the House.

In the wake of the court's decision, it is also essential that the presidential public financing system be made viable again. Cities and states will also need to enact public financing of elections.

Congress must ensure that corporate CEOs do not use corporate funds for political purposes, against the wishes of shareholders, with legislation requiring an absolute majority of shares to be voted in favor, before any corporate political expenditure is permitted. There are other legislative approaches to limit today's damage, including a range of measures proposed by Representative Alan Grayson, D-Florida.
These mitigating measures will not be enough to offset today's decision, however. The decision itself must be overturned.

We need a constitutional amendment specifying that for-profit corporations are not entitled to First Amendment protections, except for freedom of the press. A constitutional amendment is not a thing to throw around lightly. But today's decision so imperils our democratic well-being, and so severely distorts the rightful purpose of the First Amendment, that a constitutional corrective is demanded.

Winning a constitutional amendment will be a long-term effort. The starting point is for the people to petition their government to demand action. Public Citizen with allies has launched such a petition effort. Got to www.dontgetrolled.org to sign the petition.

The Supreme Court has lost its way. Democracy is rule of the people -- real, live humans, not artificial entity corporations. Now it's time for the people to reassert their rights.

Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.
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Published on Friday, January 22, 2010 by YES! Magazine
Whose Rights?
A new Supreme Court decision promotes corporate rights at the expense of the rights of citizens. What happens when the legal structure itself stands in the way of democracy?
by Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil

Yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission-giving corporations the ability to spend money directly to influence federal elections under the Constitution's First Amendment-was inevitable. It represents a logical expansion of corporate constitutional "rights"-which include the rights of persons which have been judicially conferred upon corporations. "Personhood" rights mean that corporations possess First Amendment rights to free speech, along with a litany of other rights that are secured to persons under the federal Bill of Rights.

The expansion of corporate rights and privileges under the law has been deliberate, beginning nearly two hundred years ago with the Dartmouth decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that private corporations had rights that municipal corporations-governments composed of "we the people"-did not.
For the past two centuries, new court decisions have only expanded corporate rights and privileges.  For those who think that the way to stem this tide is to find the perfect lawsuit, stop looking. It doesn't exist, for there is no magic bullet.

Rather, in order to reverse decisions like Citizens United, the whole concept of corporate "rights"-and the way they interfere with the exercise of rights by people, communities, and nature-must be examined. And, it's not simply that corporations have "personhood" rights. It goes well beyond that.
Today's structure of law gives corporations a spectrum of legal and constitutional rights which they routinely wield against people, communities, and nature. Corporations have more rights, for example, than the communities in which they seek to do business. They can and do use those rights to lobby Congress, impact elections, and to decide for us what we eat, whether mountaintops are blown off or not, whether there are fish in the oceans, and on and on. Their constitutional and other legal rights, together with their wealth, guarantee that they can define the debates that lead to the adoption of new laws-and often write the laws themselves.

Thus the context for understanding the Citizens United decision is that we have a minority set of corporate interests, empowered by government to wield their rights against a majority. It is the history of this nation. The abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement all built movements of people in order to drive rights (for slaves, for women, for African Americans) into law-which necessarily meant eliminating rights for a minority, such as the slaveholder. In the end, it is our constitutional structure of law that purposefully places the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities, and nature. History shows that strong peoples' movements can make change by changing the legal structure itself.

In some ways, the Citizens United ruling is merely part of a predetermined destiny set by a 1700s constitutional structure that placed greater priority on the rights of property and commerce than on the rights of people and nature. Reversing Citizens United means reversing that constitutional legacy.

Today, to those who recognize that we do not have democracy when corporations located thousands of miles away are making decisions about our communities instead of us, who recognize that we cannot have sustainability so long as corporations are able to decide how clean our air and water can be, who recognize that we'll never have true health care reform so long as corporations have greater access to our elected representatives than the people who voted for them-to those people, yesterday's decision should be understood as just another brick in the wall, another step down a path that will only continue unless and until a real movement for the rights of people, communities, and nature is built. That is the work we are doing. We hope you will join us.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Thomas Linzey and Mari Margil wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Thomas is executive director, cofounder, and chief legal counsel and Mari is associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a public interest law firm that has worked with municipalities to question whether corporate "rights" can coexist with the democratic rights of communities to local self-government. Through the adoption of local, binding laws, these communities are pioneering a new structure of law which does not recognize the rights and privileges of corporations. Interested?

Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights :: Thousands of people voted to protect nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.

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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/22-8 ...

Published on Friday, January 22, 2010 by RaceWire.org
At Last! SCOTUS Finally Allows Corporations to Influence US Politics
by Juell Stewart

In a move that's sure to create such political offices as "Georgia's Junior Senator, brought to you by Coca-Cola," the New York Times reports that the Supreme Court has run roughshod over decades of federal campaign finance measures and has thrown out a rule that once prohibited corporations and unions from using their considerable coffers to back specific candidates.

With mid-term elections on the horizon, today's decision is sure to start a domino effect of increasingly corporatized candidates in a political landscape that is already hostile to smaller, grassroots campaigns. I, for one, am wary of what's around the corner in electoral politics.

While it's been clear that lobbyists and Fortune 500 companies have been paying their way onto Capitol Hill for quite some time, at least lately there's been some semblance of separation between corporate interests and political interests-if nothing else, at least we could rest easy knowing that corporations couldn't legally directly campaign for a candidate, even if they contributed millions of dollars in donations and gifts behind the scenes.

But with today's decision, those barriers are destroyed entirely. There's nothing keeping the companies with the deepest pockets from purchasing prime ad time for the candidate of their choice and effectively owning them to act in their interests for the duration of their time in office.

It seems like we're moving backwards, or at least swimming in a big ol' pool of contradictions: on one hand, the government is seeking to place blame on the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase for orchestrating the current worldwide financial gaffe, but on the other, the Supreme Court is giving companies of their ilk unprecedented political potential. If there's a silver lining to this cloud, I can't see it through the storm that's heading our way.

© 2010 ColorLines Magazine - The Applied Research Center

Juell Stewart is a research fellow with the Applied Research Center.

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In Landmark Campaign Finance Ruling, Supreme Court Removes Limits on Corporate Campaign Spending
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court rules corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect and defeat candidates. One lawmaker describes it as the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case justifying slavery. We speak with constitutional law professor, Jamin Raskin.

Jamin Raskin, Professor of Constitutional Law at American University and a Maryland State Senator. He is the author of several books, including Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The American People.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin our show today looking at yesterday's landmark Supreme Court ruling that will allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to elect and defeat candidates.

In a five-to-four decision, the Court overturned century-old restrictions on corporations, unions and other interest groups from using their vast treasuries to advocate for a specific candidate. The conservative members of the Court ruled corporations have First Amendment rights and that the government cannot impose restrictions on their political speech.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy described existing campaign finance laws as a form of censorship that have had a, quote, "substantial, nationwide chilling effect" on political speech.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens described the decision as a radical departure in the law. Stevens wrote, quote, "The Court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation." Stevens went on to write, quote, "It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress, and the States to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process."
To talk more about this ruling, we're joined by Jamin Raskin. He's a professor of constitutional law at American University and a Maryland state senator. He is the author of several books, including Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The American People.
Professor Raskin, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of the Supreme Court's ruling.

JAMIN RASKIN: Good morning, Amy.
Well, we've had some terrible Supreme Court interventions against political democracy: Shaw v. Reno, striking down majority African American and Hispanic congressional districts; Bush v. Gore, intervening to stop the counting of ballots in Florida. But I would have to say that all of them pale compared to what we just saw yesterday, where the Supreme Court has overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to declare that private, for-profit corporations have First Amendment rights of political expression, meaning that they can spend up to the heavens in order to have their way in politics. And this will open floodgates of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local elections, as Halliburton and Enron and Blackwater and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs can take money directly out of corporate treasuries and put them into our politics.

And I looked at just one corporation, Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest corporation in America. In 2008, they posted profits of $85 billion. And so, if they decided to spend, say, a modest ten percent of their profits in one year, $8.5 billion, that would be three times more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign and every candidate for House and Senate in the country spent in 2008. That's one corporation. So think about the Fortune 500.

They're threatening a fundamental change in the character of American political democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about President Obama's response? He was extremely critical, to say the least. He said, "With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politicsŠa major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans." Yet a number of especially conservatives are pointing out that there was-that President Obama spent more money for his presidential election than anyone in US history.

JAMIN RASKIN: OK, well, that's a red herring in this discussion. The question here is the corporation, OK? And there's an unbroken line of precedent, beginning with Chief Justice Marshall in the Dartmouth College case in the 1800s, all the way through Justice Rehnquist, even, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, saying that a corporation is an artificial creation of the state. It's an instrumentality that the state legislatures charter in order to achieve economic purposes. And as Justice White put it, the state does not have to permit its own creature to consume it, to devour it.

And that's precisely what the Supreme Court has done, suddenly declaring that a corporation is essentially a citizen, armed with all the political rights that we have, at the same time that the corporation has all kinds of economic perks and privileges like limited liability and perpetual life and bankruptcy protection and so on, that mean that we're basically subsidizing these entities, and sometimes directly, as we saw with the Wall Street bailout, but then they're allowed to turn around and spend money to determine our political future, our political destiny. So it's a very dangerous moment for American political democracy.

And in other times, citizens have gotten together to challenge corporate power. The passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 is a good example, where corporations were basically buying senators, going into state legislatures and paying off senator-paying off legislators to buy US senators, and the populist movement said we need direct popular election of senators. And that's how we got it, basically, in a movement against corporate power.

Well, we need a movement for a constitutional amendment to declare that corporations are not persons entitled to the rights of political expression. And that's what the President should be calling for at this point, because no legislation is really going to do the trick.

Now, one thing Congress can do is to say, if you do business with the federal government, you are not permitted to spend any money in federal election contests. That's something that Congress should work on and get out next week. I mean, that seems very clear. No pay to play, in terms of US Congress.

And I think that citizens, consumers, shareholders across the country, should start a mass movement to demand that corporations commit not to get involved in politics and not to spend their money in that way, but should be involved in the economy and, you know, economic production and livelihood, rather than trying to determine what happens in our elections.

AMY GOODMAN: This is considered a conservative court, Jamin Raskin, but isn't this a very activist stance of the Supreme Court justices?

JAMIN RASKIN: Indeed. The Supreme Court has reached out to strike down a law that has been on the books for several decades. And moreover, it reached out when the parties to the case didn't even ask them to decide it. The Citizens United group, the anti-Hillary Clinton group, did not even ask them to wipe out decades of Supreme Court case law on the rights of corporations in the First Amendment. The Court, in fact, raised the question, made the parties go back and brief this case, and then came up with the answer to the question that the Court itself, or the five right-wing justices themselves, posed here.

There would have been lots of other ways for those conservative justices to find that Citizens United's anti-Hillary Clinton movie was protected speech, the simplest being saying, "Look, this was pay-per-view; it wasn't a TV commercial. So it's not covered by McCain-Feingold." But the Court, or the five justices on the Court, were hell-bent on overthrowing McCain-Feingold and the electioneering communication rules and reversing decades of precedent.

And so, now the people are confronted with a very serious question: Will we have the political power and vision to mobilize, to demand a constitutional amendment to say that it is "we, the people," not "we, the corporations"?

AMY GOODMAN: Jamin Raskin, we want to thank you very much for being with us, professor of constitutional law at American University's School of Law and a Maryland state senator.
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