Dems Take on Supreme Court's Giant Sell-Out of Our Democracy to Corporations

It's always something! It really ticks me off when the President has to spend every day of his life fighting the GOP and cleaning up the Bush/Cheney mess. The republicans are really getting on my last nerve and the Supreme Court should be taken to the public square and flogged. When does it ever become about the People for these clowns?~Mem

By Joshua Holland July 29, 2010 |

The Supreme Court handed over our political system to corporate power, and now some lawmakers are fighting to get it back.

Editor’s note: Sign a petition urging Congress to address the unlimited corporate campaign spending ushered in by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling here.

Democrats in Congress are fighting to undo, or at least mitigate, the potential damage wrought by the Supreme Court in its Citizens United decision, an example of right-wing judicial activism that has the potential to put the final nail in the coffin of American self-governance and turn over our elections to multinational corporations.

Speaking at last week’s Netroots Nation conference, a gathering of liberal activists, Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the threat posed by Citizens United in simple-to-understand terms. “We’re now in a situation,” he told the crowd, “where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’” That’s power.

The Citizens United ruling overturned key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, rules that kept corporations -- and their lobbyists and front groups (as well as labor unions) --- from spending unlimited amounts of cash on campaign advertising within 60 days of a general election for federal office (or 30 days before a primary). To get there, the court’s conservative majority stretched the Orwellian legal concept known as “corporate personhood” to the limit, and gave faceless multinationals expansive rights to influence our elections under the auspices of the First Amendment. Read More....