And here we are.. a nation of lawyers, guns and money.
The lawyers argue before the courts, who decide that money rules all. And mentally ill people with guns go on shooting rampages.
Today on the show, we continued discussing the ramifications of the Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon vs FEC – with David Cobb, national spokesperson at Move to Amend and David Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center.
Move to Amend has been building a movement to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United (and now, too, McCutcheon) which would explicitly state that corporations are not people and that money does not equal speech. A number of other constitutional amendments have been introduced, and Move to Amend has a handy comparison page so you can see what each of them includes, and doesn’t include.
They also have a pledge that you can sign on to here, that simply states:
“I pledge, if necessary, to join others in my community, and engage in acts of dignified, peaceful civil disobedience that could result in my arrest in order to send the message to the Supreme Court and the Congress of the United States that we must amend the Constitution to state that corporations are not people and money is not free speech.”
There’s another interesting piece of legislation that could go a long way to fix the problems in our campaign finance system while we work though the process of amending the constitution. The Grassroots Democracy Act, introduced by Congressman John Sarbanes (D-MD) would make politicians and candidates reliant on actual citizens/voters instead of big moneyed interests. Here’s Lawrence Lessig’s pitch about it, and following is Congressman Sarbanes talking about his bill… I’ll be inviting him on the show. Interesting idea!