While the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision unleashed unlimited, billionaire-funded SuperPACs nationwide, in California they've been around since 2002, growing by leaps and bounds every election year. We can't outspend them, but we CAN expose who REALLY pays for political ads, right in the ads themselves, with the CA DISCLOSE Act, AB 1148, which comes to a vote in the CA Assembly on Tuesday Jan. 31.
Californians, please take action now to pass the CA DISCLOSE Act!
The CA DISCLOSE Act would require political ads to clearly show the top three funders paying for them, in every ad! It's sponsored by the nonprofit California Clean Money Campaign and supported by CA Common Cause, the CA League of Women Voters, the CA Nurses Association, CalPIRG, major environmental groups, the Green Chamber of Commerce, and more than a hundred local citizen groups across California.
The DISCLOSE Act applies to ballot propositions, too! Campaign spending on CA ballot propositions has always been unlimited, with the result that NO progressive state ballot propositions opposed by Big Money have passed since 1988! In 2005, Big Pharma spent a record $155 million to defeat a proposition that would have lowered prescription drug prices for all Californians. They tricked voters with misleading ads that hid the major drug companies paying for the ads.
If the DISCLOSE Act had been in effect, Californians would have known who paid for all the attack ads, passed that proposition and saved billions of dollars in prescription drug costs.
Today, no elected official or candidate for state, local, or federal office is safe from the unlimited spending power of the SuperPACs, which are fronts for the billionaires and major corporations who fund them. Their power to influence voters depends on misleading ads that hide their true identity behind committee names like "Stop Hidden Taxes," when it's really Big Oil, Big Pharma, or billionaires.
To this day, nobody knows who's funding the Pro-Romney SuperPAC! The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove, and the notorious oil billionaire Koch brothers all hide the true identity of who's paying for their political ads, and they're planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy this year's elections for Congress as well as governors and state legislatures.
Once voters know the truth about who's paying for all political ads, however, the unlimited SuperPACs will lose their super-power to buy elections. The California Clean Money Campaign is urging CA voters to call their Assemblymembers on Monday Jan. 30 to tell them to pass AB 1148, the CA DISCLOSE Act.
And please know that full disclosure of campaign funders is constitutional -- in the Citizens United decision, eight of the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court said they have no problem with disclosure.