Broadcast media still dominates the world of political campaign ads, which are financed more than ever by interest groups that will play an increasing role in the 2012 presidential election, according to media reports issued this week.
On the 2nd anniversary of the United States Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission, human people gathered on the West Steps of the Colorado Capitol to protest the decision they say granted human-like rights to corporations.
The combative head of an anti-environmentalist Washington, D.C. nonprofit with Colorado roots vowed on Thursday to appeal last week’s Montana Supreme Court ruling upholding the state’s nearly 100-year-old ban on corporate campaign spending.
A Florida congressman has introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The OCCUPIED Amendment would make it clear that corporations are not people and cannot spend money electioneering.
Last week, New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet and five fellow Democratic colleagues, proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow Congress to regulate the campaign finance system. Long an advocate of campaign finance reform, Udall seeks to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United decision, in which the high court ruled it unconstitutional to regulate the money spent during elections by corporations and unions. In that decision, the Court essentially based its ruling on an earlier Supreme Court decision of 1976, Buckley v. Valeo, which ruled that spending money in elections is a form of speech.
Catholic Answers, an information and advocacy group run by non-clergy members, last week asked the US Supreme Court to examine the way the Internal Revenue Service determines whether or not a nonprofit group has engaged in improper political activity. The group drew the attention of the IRS after criticizing Sen. John Kerry during his bid for president in 2004. To many, a case of this kind will seem long overdue, given the increasingly politicized nature of religious organizations in the United States over the last four decades.
Campaign finance spending will exceed $6 billion this year, and one man deserves a fair amount of the credit — election lawyer James Bopp, architect of the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court case and ideological crusader against state-based campaign finance laws that limit corporate expenditure, as The Texas Independent recently reported.
Catherine Engelbrecht is just a suburban Houston soccer mom, an accidental activist with a cowboy hat and a dream to help get America back on track. That’s the story in a year’s worth of nationwide media hype, and in her legal defense against a suit from the Texas Democratic Party.
Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission granted corporations and unions the right to directly and expressly back political candidates, and triggered an enormous new wave of political spending. Now watchdog groups are trying to find ways to make sure voters can see who is funding which candidates.
It will come as no surprise to Coloradans force-fed a fire-hose stream of ugly and untrustworthy campaign election material over the last two years that independent spending– spending directly tied to no candidate and mostly free of accountability– more than tripled in the state from 2008 to 2010. This according to a recent report released by watchdog group Follow the Money, which singles out Colorado for study. The authors report that, although the state has relatively strong disclosure laws, larger changes in campaign finance rules have let loose here as everywhere in the country a storm of money and a sea of roiling paperwork that can cover over as much as it reveals.
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