The debates on the floor during the last two weeks of the session take
on a new sense of urgency and can go on for hours on a single bill. It is an honored tradition to continue the
debate until everyone who has a question about a bill or has something to say
about it has done so. That scenario unfolded
late one evening, not on a bill, but on a joint resolution of the House and
Senate.
You may recall that in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court, on a 5-4
vote, struck down the McCain-Feingold campaign financing bill in a case that
became known as the Citizens United decision.
Citizens United was/is a political action committee (PAC) that sued to
remove the limits a PAC could spend in elections. The court ruled that not only was money
equivalent to speech, but that putting a limit on such “speech” violated the
First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The Supreme Court extended that concept in a ruling on April 2nd of this
year in the McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission, which effectively
equated corporations to people and struck down any limits on corporate campaign
contributions. (It was like a terrible
April Fool’s joke on democracy!)
If we were to try and reverse these decisions – and I believe we
should – we would have two options.
First, the U.S. Congress, by 2/3 vote of each of the House and the
Senate, could pass a Constitutional Amendment.
Alternatively, 2/3 of the state legislatures could call for a
Constitutional Convention for the purpose of proposing amendments to the
Constitution. Any amendment would then
require ratification by ¾ of the states, i.e. 38 states, to take effect. Both options are established in Article V of
the U.S. Constitution.
Several amendments have been proposed in the U.S. Senate since
Citizens United to overturn the decision.
However, since the present partisan dysfunction of Congress makes it
unlikely that any amendment would get traction, Dr. Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L.
Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, has been
advocating the second approach. Dr.
Lessig has visited Vermont several times, including giving a seminar at UVM two
years ago. Most recently, he visited the
statehouse last month to support JRS27, a joint resolution sponsored by Senator
Ginny Lyons and others, requesting Congress to call a convention for proposing
amendments to the U.S. Constitution “that would limit the corrupting influence
of money in our electoral process, including … by overturning the Citizens
United decision.”
