Open Thread: Citizens United the left’s Roe v. Wade?
CU’s obvious horrendousness could give us a big opportunity to unify the party and give us a clear litmus test for Dems aspiring to elective office. We can’t ask Dems to give up PAC money while the Republicans are being funded by a handful of lunatic millionaires, but we can be sure that Citizens United is public enemy number one in every election until it is history.
News Journal reporing today that Joe DiPinto is so “traumatized” that he switched from Republican to Democrat to support Montgomery. The poor guy, maybe folks can take up a collection for some counseling or something…Say it ain’t so Joe.
I think it’s a lot tougher to trust people. We’re asking people to accept mega pac money, then turn around and try t legislate mega pacs out of existence. Trusting that someone will betray their funders for their voters is a dangerous game. Not that i have an alternate solution.
Two observations:
1. Roe v Wade created its own mass constituency: millions of women and their supporters who saw that new rights had been given to them personally, and who were therefore mobilized not to allow those rights to be compromised. Citizens United is, unfortunately, insider baseball to 99% of the populace and will probably remain so.
2. If (and it’s a big IF) CU could be portrayed as silencing citizen voices rather than empowering corporate voices (in other words, change the “frame” so that it is shutting out grassroots organizers), then it could be more effectively compared to Plassey v Ferguson. “Don’t let them give us ‘separate but equal’ elections, where the voices of millionaires can be heard, but ours cannot.”
The other possibility is to follow up Mitt Romney’s line about corporations and people, and turn this into the long-necessary debate on corporate personhood: “The First Amendment protects the free speech rights of people, not immortal business organizations.”
I wish some Wikileaks-type operation would emerge for whistleblowers to drop mass dumps identifying anonymous PAC donations. Remember the old days when somebody would just send that kind of stuff to the New York Times?
Steve Im afraid your solution 3 would backfire and we’d end up with corporations being allowed to run for office.
Can you imagine… President Halliburton? (again)
Actually ben, that’s EXACTLY how we should do it, with Jonathan Swift type satire–if corporations are entitled to free speech, then why can’t Exxon vote, and why not elect President Comcast?
That would be exactly the frame necessary to sell the idea–“Comcast doesn’t just want your money, it wants to be your Senator, too”
And Betty Crocker can be the first female president!!
yeah.. satire… i was joking. Heh…. heh….
Steve, hopefully it ends up being a War of the Worlds scenario where they become our politicians but just aren’t prepared for the sht-storm and fall apart leaving us all in peace.
“vote Delmarva for congressman or else we might not be able to keep your power on this summer. “
i assume they would have a proxy voting…. or else they may have to create an algorithm for deciding votes and crafting legislation based on the company’s best interests.
This conversation makes me what to see a sequel to iRobot where Viki comes back and runs for office instead….. and wins.
I think Steve Newton’s analysis is spot on, especially point #1. I also think that citizen bloggers can play a role in getting CU overturned by charting the connections among superpac contributors (to the extent they are known), the politicians they support, and how those politicians vouchsafe their vested interests.
For a very long time I’ve been largely ambivalent about Public Financing of elections, but after watching this year’s shenanigans, I’m pretty much convinced that it may be the Final Solution. Details of how this works needs to be worked out, but needs to be accompanied by time restrictions on campaigning — as in you can start on 1 December the year before an election year, so that candidates are limited to a little more than 10 months of campaigning.
Final Solution….really?
I think there is a huge challenge in waging an underground war on these weasels. Considering private corporate control over the internet is being shilled as a free speech crusade in congress, it wont be long until your internet provider can consider it “their private property” and censor what you say… much in the same way a bar can clean “this place has rats” off of their bathroom walls. We need to act fast. One of these bills is bound to pass eventually.
I am concerned by what I see as the establishment response to Citizens United – confronting corporate spending in elections specifically, but not taking on the larger issue of corporate personhood.