Summary
House Democrats, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, introduced the We the People Amendment to overturn Citizens United, aiming to curb corporate influence in elections.
The constitutional amendment asserts that constitutional rights apply only to individuals, not corporations, and mandates full disclosure of political contributions.
Jayapal cited Elon Musk’s massive campaign spending and subsequent financial gains as proof of the ruling’s harm.
Advocacy groups praised the move, calling it necessary to combat corporate power and dark money in politics, but Republicans have not backed the proposal.
Instead of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, immediately get rid of the gerontocracy (Schumer, Pelosi), regroup, find a leader with some balls and declare open warfare on Republicans. It’s not like there isn’t any ammunition.
Exactly, the conservatives have spent the last 40 years gradually doing exactly this and the Democrats have spent the last 40 years denying that reality and laughing off the right wing, talk show type populists while they slowly took control of the GOP and the court system.
To late, but DO IT!!
Do this and keep doing it until it works. This isn’t a moonshot. It’s normal, sensible change. Everybody shut your fucking mouths with all this secondary “it isn’t going to work now” bitch energy. Get behind the shit you want, loudly.
Do not waste time talking about a non-starter.
You need 290 votes in the House, you have (at most) 215. You need 75 Republicans to flip.
If, miracle of miracle, that happens, it goes to the Senate where you need 60 votes to end a filibuster, you have (at best) 47. You need 13 Republicans breaking rank to end cloture + 7 more to pass it.
Then it goes to the states for ratification, you need 38. In 2024 19 states went to Harris which means you need all of them +19 Trump states.
Yeahhh…
The thing is, at the very least this forces the Republicans (and for that matter Democrats) to pick a side on the issue.
Citizens United is extremely unpopular with the Republican base, as it is with the Democrat base. If a Republican voter sees that their Congress person voted to maintain citizens United, they might be upset.
The GOP will just lie and blame everything on “radical leftists”. Which don’t really exist in the US.
Some will. But if 1% of the right see this and either become demotivated or change sides, that is enough to swing entire elections.
Way too little, way too late.
Seems like they realize repubs are winning the ‘get rich taking bribes’ game so hard it’s erasing America. Seems like it’s bad enough to alienate donors? Edit: a word
Pelosi also got rich taking bribes. Only socialists like Sanders and AOC actually fight for us
This is one of the single biggest changes we can make to our current electoral system.
Should’ve done this in 2021. This could’ve changed the 2024 election entirely.
I’d argue rank choice is more important.
If you give people actual elections, it shouldn’t matter how much money is spent on campaigns
All someone needs is $1,000 for a good website. Lower the barrier to let them on the ballot and let people rank them, and you’ll solve the problem.
The fact that both parties have been so active in opposing ranked choice voting is proof that it would break their monopolies on power.
What did they do in 2021 instead?
Probably nothing else going on really. They’re just lazy and fat off corporate cash piles, obviously.
Nothing. That’s the problem. Democrats are so afraid to play an opposition party cause it will negatively affect party leadership and top donors. They want the status quo and are more than likely benefiting from the Trump regime in many ways.
Make no bones about it: top Democrats have been complacent with a hostile takeover of the US government because it is benefiting them.
Progressive Democrats and party newcomers are seeing this reality. They tried to play the game for a bit but got burned like Bernie did. Some democrats are finally growing a backbone to stand up against geriatric party leadership.
Democrats make an opposition move
This is because Dems won’t make an opposition move
Make no bones about it: top Democrats have been complacent with a hostile takeover of the US government because it is benefiting them.
I mean, I’d make a few bones about it. The best time to be an excellent Progressive party is 50 years ago. The next best time is now, though.
I’m surprised how quickly people forgot the very first bill the Democrats introduced in 2021 addressed this very topic. The Republicans in the senate killed it.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1
Passed House (03/03/2021) For the People Act of 2021
"This bill addresses voter access, election integrity and security, campaign finance, and ethics for the three branches of government.
Specifically, the bill expands voter registration (e.g., automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (e.g., vote-by-mail and early voting). It also limits removing voters from voter rolls.
The bill requires states to establish independent redistricting commissions to carry out congressional redistricting.
Additionally, the bill sets forth provisions related to election security, including sharing intelligence information with state election officials, supporting states in securing their election systems, developing a national strategy to protect U.S. democratic institutions, establishing in the legislative branch the National Commission to Protect United States Democratic Institutions, and other provisions to improve the cybersecurity of election systems.
Further, the bill addresses campaign finance, including by expanding the prohibition on campaign spending by foreign nationals, requiring additional disclosure of campaign-related fundraising and spending, requiring additional disclaimers regarding certain political advertising, and establishing an alternative campaign funding system for certain federal offices.
The bill addresses ethics in all three branches of government, including by requiring a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices, prohibiting Members of the House from serving on the board of a for-profit entity, and establishing additional conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions for federal employees and the White House.
The bill requires the President, the Vice President, and certain candidates for those offices to disclose 10 years of tax returns."
There was less than a 0٪ chance that they could have passed a constitutional ammendment in 2021.
Love your downvotes. “Nuh uh!! They just didn’t want to!”
They didn’t try. So yes. They didn’t want to.
When you don’t do something, you don’t wanna do the task. When I delay doing the dishes, I’m not wanting to do them despite how much it’s useful for the home.
If they didn’t push for this in 2021, they didn’t want it.
That would have been useful and a great idea over a decade ago.
Now it’s just “let’s do this” and nothing will happen. Its too late.
I mean… that was literally one of the things that Hillary ran on. So… your timeline checks out.
Only at the end to try and court Bernie supporters. Before that she was mostly silent and won the primary with corporate money.
Y’know what, I’ll bite. It’s been long enough I can’t definitively say whether it came up before or not.
But that’s a point though, she did move her policy to that of the ones that the Bernie supporters and they still snubbed her and we got Trump.
So in that we made sure the Left didn’t have a seat at the table because they didn’t bother to show up right after showing they had the numbers and ability to do so, and we got a billionaire man-baby who sucks up to other billionaires and fascist regimes. Good trade.
I say this as a Bernie voter, but my national vote was still for Hillary. Citizens United and the Supreme Court were on the line, I told other leftists it was on the line, I was told I was overreacting… so call me fucking Cassandra.
I was a Bernie and Hillary voter as well. I also failed to convince a number of other Bernie voters that they had to support Hillary.
She held too far center for too long and a lot of Bernie voters didn’t trust her or the party. Hell, even when she announced a push for an amendment in her first 30 days I didn’t buy it would happen but I also knew we needed to keep Trump out.
Really I still didn’t trust the party. I still don’t think we have enough progressives and will still do what we need to keep corporate donors happy above the voting public.
Money is speech and it has the loudest platform.
As we’ve seen though, a woman cannot win against a racist sexist nazi shitbag in the united states.
Don’t at me (as the young people say), I voted for the woman.
Pretty much. I just always like to point these things out as there’s a nice bit of revisionism amongst the left on “We want this, why didn’t the dems give it to us” while people don’t show up and vote for them, then cry they didn’t show up because “Dems are as bad as republicans.” Which frankly is as bad as the right on their revisionism.
The 16 election was an attempt to take down Citizens United as well as bring up the Trans Pacific Partnership. The TPP was specifically trying to get the other Asian countries to lock out China in trade to reduce its power. But the right wingers thought “No we want to be hard on China” pulled out of it, and basically left China to look at all the other Asian countries who didn’t have a partnership with the US and bring them to heel.
Citizens United came about in 2010, during the Obama administration, and specifically that same year Republicans had gained majority in the House, creating a divided congress that meant no laws could get through, especially an anti-Citizens United bill. An executive order isn’t going to fix this one.
The Left falls into the same fallacy as the Right, they want a strong leader who can “solve all the problems.” Problem is the Right is really good at it because it’s really their authoritarian style. The part that pisses me off is the Right is also really good at showing up at the polls when they matter even if they hate the candidate, as long as it moves the needle one step over to their side while the Left keeps having a lot of voters be all or nothing.
Yeah even if they did actually repeal it, which they won’t, it’s really closing the stable door after the horse has bolted at this point IMO.
Because with the current administration, you can say it’s illegal to accept money from so-and-so, and they’ll just go “fuck you” and do it anyway and nobody will will stop them or bring consequences, so … yeah. This is kind of doing time, not talking time.
So they throw this impossible task out there, something they can put all their energy and rhetoric into which will ultimately not bear results in my lifetime, and they can say see I was fighting against this tyranny.
This is such a bald-face transparent PR move I hope everyone sees it for what it is.
They’ve had multiple chances to fix this when they had real power. They’re idiots.
“But they didn’t have a 90 seat advantage in the Senate and 400 house seats and the presidency!!! How do you expect them to get anything done without that?!?” - centrists
I literally see these every week here. Like somehow when they have a majority they are unable to pass any laws, and when in a minority, they can’t stop anything Republicans do.
Like every time there is a majority, every democrat just is unable to do focus on anything but one bill. That one bill is all can be voted on, all anyone can vote on, and all that can be focused on. Any other legislation by legislators can’t exist.
Good, but why the hell didn’t they do this when they had control of Congress?
No party has been anywhere near that level of “control” for a very long time.
OK, but trying would have let them know where the weak links are, where to put pressure in the future. Same goes for Dobbs. Even if they failed to secure a federal right to abortion in the legislature, having the voting record would have been a powerful tool to use against DINOs – “Shape up, or loose your funding”
That they never even tried means Democrats are just not interested in strategically working towards success.
Oh gee, another Dem exercise in futility. What a bunch of feckless losers.
“Guys the system isn’t broken, just one more big tweak and it’ll be fine again, pinky promise.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if they did shit like this when they were actually in power?
It would fail the vote either way, as a constitutional amendment requires a supermajority vote - and there has not been a supermajority in the Senate since 1979. Which was the last time the Democrats successfully put through an amendment, before anyone further complains they do nothing with power when they get it.
Depending on how jaded you are this is either a stunt, or the particular (left-leaning?) Democrats involved in tabling the legislation are trying to raise the issue their constituents have asked them to. Either way it’ll force the Republicans to show their hand and all vote against it.
Yeah it would have forced the republicans to show their hamd back when democrats did control most of the government too Maybe a bit more trying things that would ‘force the republicans to show their hand’ would have been useful when something actually could have been done about it. Everyone knows the republicans fucking hand now.
Everyone knew the Republicans ‘hands’ back before the federal election too - they haven’t suddenly switched their platform or policies. Nothing has changed. You make it sound like there was vaguery in the leadup?
Just a whole lotta rubes who voted for Republicans after listening to people like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are finally having the penny drop that they’ve been conned.
Gosh, if only someone had told them once or twice in the last decade that Donald Trump is a multiple-convicted world famous conman and fraud. Damn Democrats!
So why do this now? Doing it back when they had power would have been a lot more meaningful. Or actually doing literally anything to improve peoples lives. But doing it now is just an entirely empty gesture to try to win back peoples support that they dont deserve in any way.
Obama had a supermajority in 2008.
Yes. Suture up that corpse.
Yep, now that it’s far too late and the damage is done and they don’t have a majority.
Now they ask for this? After having zero majority in either house? Acter letting a nazi waltz into the white house?
The Democrats have a long history of waiting until Republicans hold a majority in both houses to propose milquetoast change.
Keeps their name in the papers without actually having to do anything.
The Democrats have a long history of waiting until Republicans hold a majority in both houses to propose milquetoast change.
Every time. Legalizing weed? Only when Republicans control. Making abortion federally protected? Only Republican control. Raising the minimum wage? Only when Republicans control.
When they are in office? Never one of those, but pushing for bills that get everyone in congress paid more by their handlers called lobbyists.
Yeah, the sole reason they’re suggesting it now is because they know it’s too little too late. It will go nowhere and we all know this, them Dems will be like ‘oh but we tried!’ Fucking useless.
