Hillary Clinton repeated in her long and policy-heavy announcement speech Saturday that, “if necessary,” she’d support a constitutional amendment to undo the Citizens United case.
And I continue to wonder why she hedges.
I wonder why she doesn’t simply write such an amendment, something saying:
• Corporations aren’t persons for purposes of campaign spending; that, if they were, they could vote, which they can’t.
• Congress may make laws limiting the amount of money persons or corporations may spend in any and all forms to advance or assail political candidates during campaign seasons as defined by time periods set out in the law Congress would make.
• Whatever political spending in that prescribed time period of a certain congressionally defined amount would have to be promptly and thoroughly disclosed through an appropriate and instantly public filing with a relevant government agency.
That’s a rough draft. There might be a way to write it more in blessed principle than cumbersome specificity. The point is to get it written and make it real.
Hillary could get a Democrat, or a few dozen of them, to introduce such a joint resolution in Congress, and then run on it—on the need for it and the revealing Republican obstruction that would seem likely.
With some exceptions, Republicans tend to make out better than Democrats under unlimited and secret spending. The Kochs have been doing better than the unions, at least in congressional and gubernatorial races.
If you really want to undo a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, there are two arduous ways—well, three, actually—to go.
You could file a joint congressional resolution containing a proposed constitutional amendment specifically countermanding the court reasoning. You could try to get two-thirds of the Senate and House to vote to refer it to the states, 38 of which then would have to ratify it by acts of their legislatures.
Or you could follow the even more patient path of the opponents of Roe v. Wade. They keep passing state laws defying the case law and setting up lawsuits by which the courts, perhaps to be infiltrated by conservative judges, might steadily chop away at the decision’s application—redefining fetus viability to occur earlier in pregnancy or requiring abortion providers to show ultrasound images to abortion-seekers and yield to waiting periods.
(The third alternative, more remote still, is an entire constitutional convention that two-thirds of the states would join to take the initiative to call.)
Hillary’s embrace of a specific proposed amendment would be politically futile, of course, so long as there are enough Republicans who support unfettered and unreported big spending to deny a two-thirds congressional majority.
But it would give her specific winning rhetoric. She could point to, indeed quote, a specific solution—her own. And she could extol hers as a clear and moral solution to a cancer on our politics. And she could steadily wallop the Republicans for resisting the overpowering decency and logic of it.
She stands uncommonly positioned to take such a lead. That’s not only because she is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. It’s because Citizens United was about her personally.
A right-wing group calling itself Citizens United wanted to buy television time to show a full attack documentary on her shortly before an election. Law at the time limited what anyone, a person or group, could spend independently, meaning outside the regulated campaigns themselves, for electioneering near an election date. And the Supreme Court overturned that as a violation of free speech.
The effect is that now persons of means may go outside campaigns and spend whatever they want whenever they want to say whatever they choose—personally or through super-PACs or through nonprofits supposedly existing for nonpartisan purposes—and, in some cases (the supposedly nonpartisan nonprofits), escape public disclosure of who they are.
We now have the spectacle of campaigns setting up their own campaign accounts for the little money and then routing their really rich benefactors to super-PACs supposedly independent of them to collect and spend the big money to do the real dirty work. And the campaigns themselves pretend to have clean hands, saying they don’t coordinate with those super-PACs.
But there are these things referred to in the trade as “smoke signals.” A campaign sets up a website to display its unedited opposition research. The super-PAC goes there and sees what it is supposed to say—independently, without coordination, you see.
So it’s a shameless charade as well as an affront to fairness and equity and accountability and even democracy itself.
The criticism of Hillary would come from people on the right accusing her of breathtaking hypocrisy in advocating such a reform while, at the same time, enjoying the benefits of her own very rich super-PAC, not to mention nonprofits toiling for her secretly.
But I go back to what her husband always said when he advocated campaign-finance reform while doing his best to succeed in the competitive environment he was seeking to change. He said you play by the rules that exist even as you work to change them. He said no serious candidate seeking to represent his party responsibly and advance worthy policy could afford to disarm unilaterally.
Here’s what you say: Yes, I’m doing the very thing I say is bad. That’s because I’m not willing to run such an important race having unilaterally disarmed. But I’m offering a specific plan to change that which is bad. My opponents are doing that which is bad and loving it and fighting my plan to keep all of us from continuing to do it. That’s the difference. I do it to compete, but propose that all of us stop. They do it out of an addiction they have no desire to treat.
We worked with the Soviets on nuclear disarmament while stockpiling nuclear weapons. That’s how it works.
You can try to quit drinking or smoking by doing it cold turkey. Those are unilateral actions. But competition is different. You must engage a rival in battle by the rules that exist even if you want to change them.
You can better change them if you win, you see.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.