The clock is now ticking. We have only 28 days to keep AB 83, The Get Foreign Money Out of California Elections Act alive in the California Legislature, or it will be dead until at least 2025. We can’t let that happen. We will need an activist tsunami to make sure it doesn’t.
When our corrupted SCOTUS granted US corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in our elections with their democracy busting Citizens United (2010) ruling, they made a mistake that opened a loophole for foreign money to flood into our elections.
It’s a mistake that will come back to haunt them if we’re successful. It’s Citizens United’s Achilles heel.
The SCOTUS hung their corporate rights opinion on the idea that US corporations are “associations of citizens”, which they are not, not by any stretch. 98% of the S&P 500 US corporations will likely qualify as “foreign influenced”’ under the provisions of AB 83 and will be barred from contributing to campaigns, candidates, PACs, Super-PACs, political parties, and ballot measures.
Model legislation has been developed to #CloseTheLoophole that is allowing foreign money to pour into US elections. It is now law in Minnesota and it is pending in New York, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Washington State, and California.
The same model language was introduced into the US Congress by Representative Jamie Raskin when Democrats controlled the House, and Senator Elizabeth Warren included the language in her omnibus anti-corruption package.
As we know, it’s actions in the states that spur federal actions — and “as California goes, so goes the nation.”
This should be an easy “aye” vote for legislators. Foreign money in our elections is objectively a bad thing, right? It’s also prohibited under US code. And it’s also self-evident that as 40% of all the shares held in US corporations are held by foreign investors, when those corporations spend money from their corporate treasuries in our elections, some of that money is foreign money.
So why isn’t the AB 83 current whip count (we estimate it’s at 50 and it needs 54 of 80 to pass out of the Assembly) cruising over the 2/3 majority required to amend California’s Political Reform Act of 1974, especially when Democrats hold super majorities in both chambers of the California Legislature?
You already know the answer: it’s the money. Next month it will have been 14 years since Citizens United eviscerated campaign finance law. Around that time California imposed 12 year terms limits on legislators, so none of the members of the California Legislature have run a campaign in a pre- Citizens United climate. In fact, only two California Legislators take no corporate money at all. Unsurprisingly, they are the author and co-author of AB 83, Alex Lee and Ash Kalra.
It's understandable that legislators are concerned about how they will fund their campaigns if foreign influenced US corporations can’t continue to contribute to their re-elections efforts. Some of them have told us exactly that!
To allay their fears, their constituents need to light up their phones now and for the next three and a half weeks. As one California Democratic DNC member advised me “they need to get so many phones calls that finally they say, ‘Let me just vote for this damned thing and stop hearing about it!”
CALL TO ACTION
How can you help?
- If you live in California, call your Assembly Member TODAY and every day until they tell you they are an “aye” on AB 83. (If you’re not sure who is your Assembly Member is click here.)
- Please make it part of your daily routine for the next 28 days. It’s a New Year’s resolution that’s easy to keep and good for democracy. It takes less than a minute: Say, “I’m calling to make sure my Assemblymember is voting for AB 83.” Please keep calling until you’re told they are voting “aye”.
- If you are outside California, but have friends and relatives in California, tell them about Money Out Voters In, send them a link to this story and encourage them to call their Assembly Members.
- Recommend this diary and get it on the Trending List.
- Share this diary on your social media pages.
Assaults on our democracy are everywhere, and stunningly, many of them are coming from the now cartoonishly corrupt Roberts Court.
There is not a lot that We the People can do to combat what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has called “this MAGA-eyed Court” but shooting an arrow into the heel of Citizens United, getting foreign-influenced US corporations out of our elections, will be a seismic rebuke.
Michele Sutter is President and Co-Founder of MOVI, Money Out Voters In, the California sponsors of AB 83 - The Get Foreign Money Out of California Elections Act, now on the floor of the California Assembly.