The American Constitution Society Five Years Later, Citizens United Wreaks Havoc on Our Democracy By Fred Wertheimer, President, Democracy 21. Democracy 21 is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen democracy, prevent government corruption and empower citizens in the political process. On January 21, 2010, five Supreme Court justices rejected decades of the Court’s […]
The Stop Super PAC-Candidate Coordination Act (H.R. 425) sponsored by Representatives David Price (D-NC) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD deals with two important campaign finance problems. The Act shuts down individual-candidate Super PACs and strengthens the rules that prohibit coordination between other outside spenders and candidates and parties. The provisions in the Act are also […]
The DISCLOSE Act is sponsored in the House by Representative Van Hollen and in the Senate by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and has been introduced in each of the past two Congresses. In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court, while striking down the ban on corporate expenditures in federal elections, upheld, by an 8 […]
The Stop Super PAC-Candidate Coordination Act is also sponsored by Representatives Price and Van Hollen and contains just the super PAC/coordination provisions found in the Empowering Citizens Act. Both bills define a super PAC to be coordinated with a candidate when: – the super PAC is directly or indirectly established by or at the request […]
The Empowering Citizens Act, sponsored by Representatives David Price (D-NC) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), is the most comprehensive campaign finance reform legislation in Congress. The legislation would repair the presidential public financing system, create a public financing system for congressional races, shut down individual-candidate super PACs and strengthen the rules prohibiting coordination between candidates […]
Five years ago today, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Citizens United, a 5 to 4 decision that has wreaked havoc on our democracy. Chief Justice Roberts and his four colleagues ignored the country’s history, the Court’s own jurisprudence and the need to protect America’s representative system of government against corruption. Instead, Citizens United […]
Reuters Democracy is drowning in a sea of dark money By Fred Wertheimer The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United five years ago left the nation’s campaign finance system in shambles and our constitutional system of representative government dangerously undermined. Citizens United threw out a century of national policy and overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to […]
Democracy 21 joined with the Campaign Legal Center yesterday in filing rulemaking comments urging the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to follow the Supreme Court’s recommendations in McCutcheon v. FEC to prevent corruption of candidates and circumvention of the base contribution limits after the court struck down the aggregate cap on contributions. The watchdog groups pressed […]
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