Citizens United Decision

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I wish to take a few minutes now to speak about my amendment No. 1693, which responds to the very unfortunate Citizens United decision. January 2015 was that decision's fifth anniversary, and it has had a pretty nefarious effect on our democracy.

The premise of the decision was that unlimited corporate expenditures would not corrupt or exert improper influence in our American democratic process because there would be a regime of--to quote the decision--``effective disclosure'' that would ``provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.''

Well, here we are. Everybody in this room knows that there has been no effective disclosure whatsoever. We live in a world of dark money in which special interests spend tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in elections to buy influence and to try to make sure that people get their way. There is neither public knowledge nor accountability about that dark money spending.

The Louisville Courier-Journal, in an editorial in June 2012, described the problem very well:

Money. Buckets of it. Tidal waves that one pundit has dubbed the ``tsunami of slime.''

Well, we who are in this political world have experienced firsthand that tsunami of slime that the Citizens United decision unleashed. In the 2014 midterm elections, the Washington Post has reported that at least 31 percent of all independent spending in those elections was spent by groups that don't disclose who their donors are. You don't know who is behind their money.

You know the candidates know who is behind the money. For sure they are going to be told, but the public doesn't know who is behind that money.

And that 31 percent doesn't even count what are called issue ads, where somebody says the Presiding Officer, for instance, has a terrible position on this issue and you need to call her and tell her that her position is terrible, anti-American, wicked, no good, and that she is awful--and on and on they go. That is an issue ad, and so it doesn't even count. So that whole extra bit--also dark--is not even part of the 31 percent.

And the big, obvious thing that the Citizens United decision completely overlooked is that if you give big corporations and hugely wealthy special interests the ability to spend on elections, guess what else you give them. You give them the ability to threaten to spend or to promise to spend, and you know that those threats and promises are never going to be in any regime of effective disclosure. That is the ultimate private exercise of political influence. We have no idea how big the effect is of those silent threats and promises--silent, at least, to the public.

The American people are pretty fed up. The New York Times this week reported on a poll, and I will just quote a little bit from the story:

The findings reveal deep support among Republicans and Democrats alike for new measures to restrict the influence of wealthy givers, including limiting the amount of money that can be spent by ``super PACs'' and forcing more public disclosure on organizations now permitted to intervene in elections without disclosing the names of their donors.

And the story continues:

And by a significant margin, they reject the argument that underpins close to four decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence on campaign finance: that political money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Clearly, money facilitates speech, but it also facilitates bribery. It also facilitates simply bludgeoning political actors and political parties with pressure.

Now, the results here:

More than four in five Americans [more than 80 percent of Americans] say money plays too great a role in political campaigns ..... while two-thirds say that the wealthy have more of a chance to influence the elections process than other Americans.

That is not healthy when 80 percent of Americans think that money plays too great a part and two-thirds of Americans think that they don't have an equal shot in elections compared to the wealthy.

And it is not only Democrats and independents who feel this way. I will continue to read:

Those concerns--and the divide between Washington elites and the rest of the country--extend to Republicans. Three-quarters of self-identified Republicans support requiring more disclosure by outside spending organizations........Republicans in the poll were almost as likely as Democrats to favor further restrictions on campaign donations.

So if three-quarters of self-identified Republicans support requiring more disclosure by outside political spending organizations, I would hope that I could get support for this amendment which would require some disclosure.

It would require any company that contracts with the Department of Defense--and they get big contracts with billions, hundreds of billions of dollars--to disclose all of its campaign spending over $10,000. It is a requirement that would apply to all the corporate officers, the board members, and to anyone who owns 5 percent or more of the company.

When there is that much money sloshing around in the defense budget, and when political actors are making the decisions about where that goes, we ought to be able to connect the dots between those corporations and whom they are giving big money to.

So this is a very simple disclosure provision. Again, 75 percent of Republicans support increased disclosure, and, in fact, a considerable number of Republicans in the Senate used to support disclosure. Over and over, you see Members who are still here, including the majority leader, who were ardent supporters of disclosure--ardent supporters of disclosure, that is, until it turned out that after Citizens United, the big, dark money tended to come in on behalf of--guess what--Republicans.

So the disclosure principle evaporated, but I think it has to come back. The public is sick of it. It is time we cleaned up the political process from all this dark money. It is totally consistent with the premise of the Citizens United decision.

So when the time comes for me to call up this amendment and get it pending, I will do so with the hope that we can find some Republican support for the American people being allowed to know who is spending big bucks to influence elections. We are entitled to know that.

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