“A Defeat For American Democracy”: The Senate Tried To Overturn ‘Citizens United’ Today. Guess What Stopped Them?
A majority of the United States Senate has voted to advance a constitutional amendment to restore the ability of Congress and the states to establish campaign fundraising and spending rules with an eye toward preventing billionaires and corporations from buying elections.
“Today was a historic day for campaign finance reform, with more than half of the Senate voting on a constitutional amendment to make it clear that the American people have the right to regulate campaign finance,” declared Senator Tom Udall, the New Mexico Democrat who in June proposed his amendment to address some of the worst results of the Supreme Court’s interventions in with the recent Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decisions, as well as the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that it’s going to take more than a majority to renew democracy.
Fifty-four senators, all Democrats and independents who caucus with the Democrats, voted Thursday for the amendment to clarify in the Constitution that Congress and the states have the authority to do what they did for a century before activist judges began intervening on behalf of wealthy donors and corporations: enact meaningful campaign finance rules and regulations.
But forty-two senators, all Republicans, voted no. As a result, Udall noted, the Republican minority was able to “filibuster this measure and instead choose to support a broken system that prioritizes corporations and billionaires over regular voters.”
The Republican opposition effectively blocked further consideration of the amendment proposal, since sixty votes were needed to end debate and force a vote. And, even if the Republicans had not filibustered the initiative, actual passage of an amendment would have required a two-thirds vote.
Though the Republican move was anticipated, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has been one of the Senate’s most ardent advocates for reform, expressed frustration with the result. “I am extremely disappointed that not one Republican voted today to stop billionaires from buying elections and undermining American democracy,” said the senator, who has advocated for a more sweeping amendment to address the influence and power of corporate cash on American elections and governance. “While the Senate vote was a victory for Republicans, it was a defeat for American democracy. The Koch brothers and other billionaires should not be allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars electing candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful.“
Now, said Sanders, “the fight to overturn Citizens United must continue at the grassroots level in every state in this country.”
Sanders is right to reference the role of grassroots movements.
Four years ago, when the US Supreme Court removed barriers to corporate spending to buy elections, serious reformers said a constitutional amendment would be necessary to reverse the Court’s Citizens United ruling. Most pundits and politicians, even those who recognized the threat posed to democracy by the opening of the floodgates for big money, dismissed a constitutional fix as too bold and too difficult to achieve.
But the people embraced the constitutional route to reform. Grassroots organizing succeeded in getting sixteen states and close to 600 communities to formally demand that Congress act.
At the same time, the money poured in, with campaigning spending breaking records in the 2012 presidential and congressional elections—and heading toward breaking the record for midterm elections in 2014.
That was enough to shake up even the most cautious Senate Democrats, who began moving earlier this year to advance the Udall amendment. Though activists wanted a stronger amendment, the Senate deliberations confirmed that there is broad support for a constitutional response to the money-in-politics mess—and that a substantial number of senators now see that constitutional response as right and necessary.
“Less than five years after the Citizens United decision sparked national outrage, we have seen the movement to get big money out of politics go from local, grassroots organizing to a vote in the United States Senate,” explained People for the American Way Executive Vice President Marge Baker, who worked with activists from Public Citizen, Common Cause, Free Speech for People and other groups to collect and deliver 3.2 million signatures on petitions supporting an amendment. “Today’s historic majority vote is a remarkable milestone for this movement and a platform for taking the fight to the next level. The debate in the Senate this week is a debate that Americans across the country who are passionate about fixing our broken democracy have wanted to see.”
With the DC debate done, for now, the fight goes back to the grassroots. Activists with groups such as Move to Amend, Public Citizen’s “Democracy is for People” campaign and Free Speech for People will continue to organize and agitate, not just for an amendment but for an amendment that makes it absolutely clear that money is not speech, that corporations are not people and that citizens have a right to organize elections where votes matter more than dollars.
“We have amended the US Constitution before in our nation’s history. Twenty-seven times before. Seven of those times to overturn egregious Supreme Court rulings. For the promise of American democracy, we can and we will do it again,” declared John Bonifaz, the president of Free Speech for People, said Thursday. “The pressing question before the nation today is whether it is ‘we the people’ or ‘we the corporations and big money interests.’ This is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. This is a deeply American issue. Whatever our political differences may be, we all share the common vision of government of, for, and by the people. Today’s US Senate vote is just the beginning. While this amendment bill did not receive this time the required two-thirds support in order to pass the Senate, we will be back again and again until we win. History is on our side.’
By: John Nichols, The Nation, September 12, 2014
“The Political Value Of Fear”: McCain Joins Far-Right Chorus On ISIS Border Threat
There can be no doubt that ISIS’s brutal murder of two journalists had a deep impact on how Americans perceive the terrorist threat. For years, polls showed a war-weary nation reluctant to launch new military offenses in the Middle East, but the recent beheadings abroad changed the calculus on the public’s appetite for intervention.
But it’s also true that many voices in the U.S. have exploited the political value of fear.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) argued a few weeks ago that there’s “a very real possibility” that ISIS terrorists may have entered the United States through the southern border with Mexico. Soon after, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added that the U.S. border is “porous,” and officials must “secure our own borders” to prevent “ISIS infiltration.” This week, former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), now running in New Hampshire, echoed Perry’s original claim, telling Fox News that ISIS terrorists might “actually [be] coming through the border right now.”
Last night on CNN, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joined the chorus.
ANDERSON COOPER: Senator McCain, the president also said that we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland. Americans who hear those words might wonder, if that is really the case, then why do we need to take action against ISIS? To that you say what?
JOHN MCCAIN: I say that today, we had a hearing, and there was testimony from the counterterrorism people and the Department of Homeland Security. There is Twitter traffic right now and Facebook traffic, where they are urging attacks on the United States of America. And there is a great concern that our southern border and our northern border is porous and that they will be coming across.
A few hours earlier on Twitter, McCain encouraged his followers to read a piece on a far-right website, which reported that the U.S. officials have “confirmed” that Islamic State terrorists are “planning” to infiltrate the United States through our southern border.
Is it any wonder so many Americans are afraid?
Perhaps now would be a good time to pause for a deep breath – and a reality check.
The basic facts are not in dispute. First, there’s no evidence – literally, none at all – of ISIS terrorists entering the United States through the southern border with Mexico. In fact, there’s no evidence of ISIS terrorists even trying.
Second, the southern border is not “porous.” The Obama administration really has increased U.S. border security to levels unseen in modern times.
But what about the report McCain promoted that said U.S. officials have “confirmed” that Islamic State terrorists are “planning” to infiltrate through Mexico? The senator may have heard what he wanted to hear, but that’s not quite what officials told lawmakers.
Despite some Twitter chatter, there is no evidence ISIS terrorists are trying to slip into the United States from Mexico, Department of Homeland Security officials told Congress Wednesday.
Administration officials said they are more concerned about jihadists entering the U.S. legally on commercial airline flights.
Administration higher-ups testifying at a House hearing Wednesday threw cold water on scary border scenarios cited by conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Francis Taylor, the undersecretary for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, told McCain that there have been some “social media exchanges” among ISIS adherents about the “possibility” of entering the United States through Mexico, but none of the exchanges have led to action and Taylor added that U.S. officials are “satisfied we have the intelligence and capability on the border that would prevent that activity.”
So what are we left with? Some lunatics wrote some tweets about the “possibility” of trying to get into the United States. I don’t want to play semantics games, but it’s fair to say this is a far cry from Islamic State terrorists “planning” to infiltrate the country through Mexico.
What’s more, as Steve M. noted, “Let me remind you: Al Qaeda has never gotten anyone across the Mexican border to commit a terrorist act – and Al Qaeda clearly does want to pursue attacks on the West. We have to be watchful, but no, this sort of attack isn’t going to happen soon.”
It’s important to appreciate why Republicans are pushing this line. It seems pretty clear that McCain and others see the utility of Americans being afraid – if the public fears a domestic attack from ISIS, there will be stronger support for more and expansive wars.
But Republicans also want the White House to give the right what it wants on immigration: more border security in exchange for nothing. This rhetoric is intended to kill two birds with one stone.
No one should be fooled.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 11, 2014
“Pretending To Be Relevant”: Man Who Failed Twice At Becoming President Thinks He’d Be Better At Being President Than Hillary Clinton
Mitt Romney, once governor of Massachusetts and a failure at winning presidential elections, pops up every now and again to tell us that he is not running for president. These TV interviews can be grating, but they’re also charitable: Romney gets to pretend he actually is relevant, or even president, and his opinion is afforded the sort of faux-weight that only a Sunday news show can provide. It’s political cos-play.
This week, it was Romney on Barack Obama’s follies, and Romney on Hillary Clinton’s presidential bona fides.
You will likely not be surprised to hear that Romney shared his disappointment with Obama in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “I think the president is really out of touch with reality,” Romney said of the man who twice accomplished what he, himself, could not. “He’s so out of touch with reality that he hasn’t taken the necessary steps. . . . He’s too busy on the golf course. I don’t know if you can see the reality from the fairway, but he doesn’t see reality.” (Nailed it, Romney thought after letting go of that zinger.)
Obama’s foreign policy is fundamentally flawed because it is “based on common humanity, and humanity is not common,” Romney said. “Bad people do bad things.” Apparently the president is not hip to the fact that ISIS is “bad.”
Romney is, per Romney, a more skilled politician that not just the current president, but also the Democratic frontrunner for 2016. Asked if he would deliver a better performance in the White House than Clinton, Romney said there was “no question in my mind,” though he conceded one complicating factor: “The American people may disagree with me.”
During both of his failed presidential campaigns, Romney tried to use his record as a businessman as proof that he knew how to run the government (because he ran companies, remember?). He repeated that winning line on Sunday: “You’ve also got to have people who have actually run something. . . . I don’t think Hillary Clinton has that experience.”
“My time has come and gone,” Romney said, during the nationally televised interview.
If Romney changes his mind and reneges on his oft-repeated promise not to run for president again, perhaps he can point to comments by high-profile supporters such as himself as evidence of his political vitality. In Mitt he trusts.
By: Kia Makarechi, Vanity Fair Daily, September 8, 2014
“The New Politics Of Foreign Policy”: Steadier, More Sober, More Realistic—The Balance We Have Been Seeking
Over the last decade, Americans’ views on foreign policy have swung sharply from support for intervention to a profound mistrust of any military engagement overseas. Over the same period, political debates on foreign affairs have been bitter and polarized, defined by the question of whether the invasion of Iraq was a proper use of the nation’s power or a catastrophic mistake.
This contest for public opinion has taken place in the shadow of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. For understandable reasons, the United States was thrown off balance by the horrific events of 13 years ago, and we have never fully recovered.
The emergence of the Islamic State and its barbaric beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff have shaken public opinion again. It is, of course, possible that the public’s guardedly increased hawkishness is another short-term reaction to an enraging news event. But there is a strong case that, after all the gyrations in policy and popular attitudes, we are on the verge of a new politics of foreign policy based on a steadier, more sober and more realistic view of our country’s role in the world and of what it takes to keep the nation safe.
And it fell to President Obama on Wednesday night to take the first steps toward building a durable consensus that can outlast his presidency. The paradox is that, while polls show Americans more critical than ever of the president’s handling of foreign affairs, the strategy he outlined toward the Islamic State has the potential of forging a unity of purpose across a wide swath of American opinion. In many ways, it is an approach that goes back to the pre-9/11 presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Two things are clear about where the public stands now: It is more ready to use U.S. power than it was even a few months ago. But it remains deeply wary of again committing U.S. combat troops to the Middle East. Thus the wide popularity of using air attacks to push back the Islamic State.
Obama’s strategy seeks to thread this needle. As the president explained Wednesday night, the bombing campaign the United States has undertaken is aimed at supporting those — including the Iraqi army, the Kurdish pesh merga and, perhaps eventually, Syrian opposition forces — who are bearing the burden of the fighting. Although the circumstances are quite different, Obama’s reliance on air power is reminiscent of Clinton’s actions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Obama said he was sending an additional 475 U.S. troops to Iraq “to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment.” But he was again at pains to insist that they would “not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.”
More generally, Obama is pushing a tough-minded multilateralism. His stress on building “a broad coalition of partners” and the administration’s aggressive courting of allies in both the Middle East and Europe recalls the intense rounds of diplomacy that former secretary of state James A. Baker III led on behalf of the first President Bush before the successful war to drive Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991.
Obama’s diplomatic exertions have extended to pressuring Shiite politicians in Iraq to create what he called “an inclusive government” that Sunni Muslims could regard as their own. It was the creation of such a government, he said Wednesday, that now made the rest of his strategy possible. Above all, Obama went out of his way to describe his new effort as a “counterterrorism strategy,” tying it back to the cause that large majorities of Americans embraced after the 9/11 attacks and have never stopped supporting. His new effort, he insisted, “will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Some who championed the Iraq war will, no doubt, object to this implicit criticism of a venture they still defend. Others will point to the risks of relying on Iraqis and others to take the lead on the battlefield. In the meantime, anti-interventionists — who still loom large in the president’s party and in Republican libertarian quarters — will continue to be wary of any re-escalation of U.S. military engagement. And a bitter election season is hardly an ideal moment for building bipartisanship.
Nonetheless, circumstances have presented Obama with both an opportunity and an obligation to steer U.S. policy toward a middle course that acknowledges a need for American leadership and the careful use of American power while avoiding commitments that are beyond the country’s capacity to sustain. It is the balance we have been seeking since an awful day in September shook us to our core.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 10, 2014
“The New Touchy-Feely Organization”: All Of A Sudden The NRA Doesn’t Want To Mention Guns
Two weeks ago, coincidentally on the same day that the unfortunate 9-year old girl accidentally shot and killed a firearms instructor in Arizona, the NRA kicked off a series of Netflix-style video ads that are perhaps the organization’s most disingenuous effort to present itself as something other than what it really is; namely, an organization devoted to ownership and use of guns. In fact, having watched all 12 one-minute productions, I can tell you that the only way you would know that this is an effort of the NRA is that each commentator ends his or her spiel by telling the viewer that their wholesome and didactic script was produced by the “National Rifle Association of America” with a slight pause and then heavy emphasis on the word ‘America’ even though officially the NRA is still just the NRA, not the NRAA.
This new media blitz by the people who used to bring us messages like “only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is significant insofar as the word “gun” is never mentioned in any of these videos, not even once. You would think that the NRA had become some kind of touchy-feely civics organization devoted to uplifting our moral virtues rather than a trade association committed to getting everyone in America to own a gun. And not only are the minute-long lectures all about honesty, and decency, and respect for everyone’s point of view, but only four of the homilies are delivered by white males, who just happen to own most of the guns in America — seven of the commentators are women, one is Asian-American and, of course, there’s always room for Colion Noir, aka NRA’s African-American spokesperson.
When I first started watching these videos I thought I was looking at a remake of the Reagan “it’s morning again in America” campaign ads from 1984. Those were slickly-produced messages which never showed Reagan, who was beginning to look his age, but instead had a variety of American families proudly standing in front of a farmhouse, a factory gate, a well-manicured suburban lawn, all smiling, all happy, all gently reminding us that if we just remembered to vote Republican that all those things we cherished and loved would never be taken away.
The NRA scripts flow back and forth between a kind of Tea Party-lite condemnation about the problems we face — government spying, unlawfulness in high places, fear of crime — and an immediate sense of setting things right with the help of the “good guys,” the real Americans who can be counted on every time to keep us safe, honest, decent and sound. And who are these good guys? They are your neighbor with a decal on the back of his truck which reads: N-R-A.
I can’t imagine anyone actually watching one of these messages and coming away having learned anything at all. But I don’t think that’s the point. What the NRA is trying to do is cast itself in a softer, more reasonable and, if you’ll pardon the expression, less combative way, because for the first time they are up against an opponent whose money, smarts and media access can sway lots of people to go the opposite way. And not only does Bloomberg have that kind of dough, for the first time he might be able to energize non-gun owners to stay active and committed to the gun control fray.
This week we have another retail chain, Panera, which is walking down the path blazed by Starbucks and Target and asking gun owners to leave their weapons at home. Like the other chains, Panera isn’t posting a gun-free sign on their front doors, but if any of the 2nd-Amendment vigilantes believes that this isn’t a victory for the folks who want more gun control, they better think again. The fact that Panera’s announcement coupled their concern about guns with their desire to build social “communities” in their stores should tell you why, all of a sudden, the NRA has stopped talking about guns.
By: Mike Weisser, The Huffington Post Blog, September 10, 2014
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