I received a Daily Kos email saying:
Sign the petition from Daily Kos, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, 13 U.S. Senators and 2 Senate candidates demanding a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and McCutcheon.
Let's assume all the 13 Senators who said they support this are all Democrats running for re-election this year, and then there are the two other candidates. A little elementary school arithmetic tells me that 13 + 2 = 15. So, there
may be as many as 15 Democrats running for Senate seats this year who say they support such an amendment. There are 100 US Senators, and 1/3 of them are at the end of their terms each even-numbered election year. Some more grade school math tells me there are 33 or 34 Senate seats up for election in 2014. More simple arithmetic tells us this means
less than half of the 2014 Democratic Senate candidates are even giving lip service to supporting an amendment to protect American democracy. (13 current Senators also means less than 1/4 of current Democratic Senators are willing to say they support this legislation.)
So, how is it that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is associated with this petition? They don't even have half of their candidates or 1/4 of their Senators in line with the goals of the petition!
As with numerous such "petitions" and issue talk, the point isn't real action on this crucial matter - it's a gimmick to get social change advocates to give money and time to campaigns for a party that plays them with this kind of trickery.
If the Democratic Party seriously wanted to pass a constitutional amendment to fix this problem, could they succeed today? That's not really the point. The GOP knows it can get benefits from repeatedly approving House bills to repeal the Affordable Care Act - although they know their bill won't become law. As the old song said, "Step by step the longest march can be won". But you have to start walking. If the Democrats were serious about this they'd be trying to build a movement around the issue. They wouldn't just talk about the issue in front of audiences they know wanted to hear it - they would take the case to the general public every chance they got.
Our democracy is being eroded by rulings such as Citizens United, by gerrymandering, by voter intimidation, by efforts to selectively purge voter rolls, by efforts to make it harder to register to vote and to be accepted as a legitimate voter at the polling site, by hours-long waiting lines in certain polling places, by cutting back polling hours, etc.
This isn't just a constant status quo which has "always been this way". Citizens United was the first major step at the national level - which has been followed by further rulings, and which has more pending cases which can be expected to move the country even further in that direction. And corporate forces keep trying those other ways to disenfranchise voters who don't believe in the corporate agenda.
This isn't a problem that started yesterday. It's not that the Democrats haven't had time to respond. The Citizens United ruling was in 2010. In 2012, the GOP only got a majority in the House as a result of gerrymandering (even ignoring all the voters who were prevented from voting).
What the Democrats are allowing is a process of killing real democracy.
The logic of these efforts to change campaigns and elections is to increasingly make it harder to elect candidates who don't follow a certain amount of the corporate line. The Democratic Party has to choose between engaging in a serious fight against this process or moving further and further toward conservative corporate policy.
The arithmetic seems to tell us which choice they've made.
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It seems to me there's a very easy way to present the case to the public on the issue of big money in election campaigns. Ask voters, "How would you feel if you watched a candidate debate in which the candidate who more money from billionaires got to speak longer than a candidate who had a smaller budget based on contributions from regular Americans?" Then explain that candidate debates are only a tiny part of campaign season, and more speaking and ad time for the billionaires' candidates is how most of campaign season works today. It's wrong and it's undemocratic. If the Democrats can present the case in another way that convinces even more people in the general public, great. But where is their effort to do this? Meanwhile, advocates for billionaires and the corporations are certainly working to influence the public.
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I'm not saying there are no Democratic officials or candidates who would actually like to vote for such an amendment. It's just not the party's goal (or a goal of most of its Senators). Many years ago, Jesse Jackson spoke at a Democratic Convention and said it was a good thing the Democrats had a left wing and a right wing, because a bird needs two wings to fly. But as we see with crucial issues like this, a "bird" with one wing flapping forward and [at least] one wing flapping backward has trouble moving forward. If we want to save democracy, we will need an organization with both wings flapping forward.