Citizens United: A Decade of Unlimited Political Spending — and Consequences

Is money speech? That’s the question the Supreme Court decided 10 years ago in Citizens United v. FEC. The case, which subsequently became landmark for all the wrong reasons, undid years of painstaking bipartisan work by Congress to rein in money in politics. By making the money/speech equivalency, SCOTUS unleashed a torrent of campaign spending by special interest groups and our democracy has not been the same since. In the past decade, $4.5 billion has been spent by outside special interest groups to influence our elections. It’s an absurd amount of money, flowing through an equally absurd campaign finance system that puts disproportionate power in the hands of the wealthy few. We see it every day in our commercials, emails, and Facebook ads—the loudest voice goes to the deepest pocket.In March 2019, the House passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, new legislation designed to overhaul our broken campaign finance laws. H.R. 1 requires Super PACs to disclose their wealthy donors, establishes a voluntary small dollar matching system, and — importantly — supports amending the Constitution to nullify the Citizens United v. FEC decision.… Let’s move H.R. 1 in the Senate, create a true public finance system for federal candidates, make Election Day a national holiday and constitutionalize a repeal of Citizens United.