Tag: citizens united

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.

The Center for Responsive Politics revealed Thursday that corporate campaign spending has skyrocketed since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission decision in January 2010. The report comes at the same time as the first major state-level challenge to the controversial ruling.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats were safe as speakers at a rally held Tuesday evening to express solidarity for unions and the working class, sponsored by Moveon.org, had crowds riled up.

With her 20 minute "Story of Stuff" web-video, Annie Leonard explained some of the downside of consumerism to a lot of Americans. Now with her "Story of Citizens United" video, she explains why she and many others believe the corporate personhood extended by the 2010 Citizens United vs FEC Supreme Court decision threatens the U.S. democratic system of government. She calls on Americans to pass a Constitutional Amendment clarifying that the First Amendment granting the right to free expression is not meant to include corporations.

State Senator Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass, has responded to attack mailers sent out by GOP dirty-trickster group Western Tradition Partnership that depict her as Donald...

Colorado Secretary of State Bernie Buescher said that while he's been excited to work on the nuts and bolts of the office, it was the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that ignited his passion for ensuring the Colorado is a state for the people and not for the corporations.

State Sen. Morgan Carroll’s (D-Aurora) election expenditure bill, SB 203 (pdf), which mandates disclosure of corporate and union spending in Colorado elections, passed on third reading in the state House Tuesday, sending it to Gov. Bill Ritter’s desk after it passed on a party-line vote in the Senate Friday.