Five years after Citizens United, big money dominance still weighs heavy on our democracy and continues to silence the voices of everyday Americans. The chances of the Supreme Court correcting itself are slim. That is why a 28^th amendment is necessary to overturn Citizens United, just as Americans have used the amendment process to overturn the Supreme Court six times before

Goodwin and Clements note, “Constitutional amendments are warranted only by what James Madison called ‘extraordinary occasions.’ That is why enacting and ratifying an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is no easy matter.”

The situation we face today with regard to campaign finance is one of those ‘extraordinary occasions’.

Overwhelming political spending by a relative handful of organizations and extremely wealthy people is marginalizing the voices and participation of most Americans. In the 2012 presidential election, a few dozen super-PAC donors exceeded all the contributions of $200 or less from the nearly four million donors to the Romney and Obama campaigns combined.

The 2014 midterm elections brought even greater concentration of big spenders. Indeed, virtually all political spending now comes from far less than 1 percent of Americans, and increasingly from global corporations using “dark money” entities to obscure the source.

 

Free Speech For People co-founder and “Corporations Are Not People” author, Jeff Clements joined presidential historian and Pulitzer prize-winning author, Doris Kearns Goodwin to assess the historical implications of the Court’s 2010 ruling. Of Citizens United, Clements and Kearns Goodwin write, “It is time for Americans of all political viewpoints to come together to win the 28^th amendment—and to renew U.S. democracy again.”

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