Sen Sanders on the real impact of Citizens United

It took just 12 minutes and 29 seconds on the Senate floor for Sen. Bernie Sanders to expose the real power of corporate America over our elections. It should be a rallying cry for the embattled minority trying to clean up the system.

Sanders, the Senate’s only Independent, was speaking Dec. 8 on behalf of his proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s devastating Citizens United decision, which permits corporations, unions and issue advocacy organizations to spend unlimited amounts of money from their own funds to support or oppose candidates.

As the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog The Center for Responsive Politics said of Citizens United, it “has profoundly affected the nation’s political landscape” and resulted in “unprecedented political spending. Secret donors. New ways for unions and corporations to spend money on politics.”

With Barack Obama and the Republican presidential candidates collecting huge amounts of money and attention, Sanders focused instead on the Senate and the House, a real public service.

Noting that the six largest banks on Wall Street have assets equal to 65 percent of the national gross domestic product, he asked what happens in Congress “when an issue comes up and impacts Wall Street … to break up these huge banks and members walk up to the desk and have to decide [whether] to vote against it with full knowledge that if they vote against the interest of Wall Street that two weeks later there may be ads coming down into their state attacking them. Every member of the Senate, every member of the House, in the back of their minds, will be thinking … ‘If I cast a vote this way, if I take on the big money interest, am I going to be punished … will a huge amount of money be unleashed in my state?’ Every member knows this is true. It is not just taking on Wall Street, maybe it’s taking on the drug companies, maybe it’s taking on the private insurance companies, maybe it’s taking on the military-industrial complex. … You’re going to think twice about how you cast that vote.”Sanders’ description is much more sophisticated than the conventional view of campaign reformers: contribution received, vote given. Perhaps there is no crime, but certainly the appearance of a quid pro quo. That’s bad and it happens all the time. But in the post Citizens United world, powerful special interests have a much greater ability to influence votes with the threat of massive electoral retaliation. [emphasis added]

Read the rest at TruthDig

Bernie Sanders Explains Why Congress Fears Citizens United

by Bill Boyarsky

This is like risking a strong primary challenger when taking every significant vote.