United Citizens

It's time for us to talk about Citizens United. Citizens United was a Supreme Court case about how super pacs worked. How to fund them as well as other key rules around them.Here’s a PBS Frontline about it to give you more context if you prefer to watch(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xxiIejOmSo)  The Supreme Court decided that corporations have the same first amendment rights as people when it comes to donating to political campaigns. This means that we as citizens can not make rules on capping how much an individual or corporation can donate since it would be against the first amendment. Which means we have to think of other ways to curtail corporate money in politics. Here is one problem which we as citizens have to figure out and solve. This problem means that money can be hidden behind corporations; this is known as dark money. Dark money is a way for donors to hide who is donating money. There are a multitude of ways to do this, most are using legal entities such as 501c3 and 501c4, I won’t get into the details as this is not a legal blog, more of a civic awareness blog. The goal is to provide awareness of a current problem in our democracy. We may know the corporations who donate but we do not know where the money is coming from which is scary in itself. This is a bi-partisan issue as both sides have to follow these rules. The end goal is to overturn the court case and get dark money out of politics. The best map to overturn a Supreme Court case we have is the overturning of Roe V Wade. This strategy of pushing for individual states to decide how to deal with super pacs is the best way forward. One, the rules would be the same for the Senate and House of Representative candidates who are running for offices because the rules are state by state. Two, this gives the citizens the flexibility to decide for themselves by pushing for rules by state if California doesn’t like the idea of the Montana plan(https://montanaplan.org/) or thinks that it has a better idea they can and should push for their own rules. Some states may think that the rules are fine and others can take action and create their own rules. An argument can be made that the states have the power to decide how funding political campaigns is made by state which would mean that Citizens United would become obsolete as soon as one state passes its own law around super pac funding. The hard part about making the rules state by state is Presidential elections. Two things could happen, either candidates who are running for president run their political campaigns in their own state in which the presidential candidates could be running on different rules or all presidential candidates choose a particular state to run their presidential campaigns out of because that state has the most favorable rules. If the former happens it could come to a massive court case in which the Supreme Court would have to decide which rules should be followed. The next step I ask of you is to look into some solutions that have been provided by other states. As mentioned previously we have the Montana plan, seen here (https://montanaplan.org/). If you like this plan, reach your local legislator and mention it to them and send it to them. If you think it doesn’t go far enough, tell them your ideas. There’s also Hawaii who signed a bill already seen here (https://www.hawaiisenatemajority.com/press-release/governor-signs-senate-bill-2471-into-law-to-limit-corporate-political-spending-in-hawai-i) So far these are the first two movers but we shall see what happens next and see what state makes the next move.  The only way we beat this is through mass numbers of individuals helping and contributing.  At the end of the day these types of moments are what make the United States, the United States. We as citizens have the power to fight back state by state against dark money in politics. We get to decide and shape how our campaigns are funded and this is our time as citizens to stand up together and fight back. It’s time to show how we take back control, we have a map of how to overturn Supreme Court cases, we just have to follow it and run it down together. It may seem we are divided but we are much closer together than we think and this issue will help us come together as we go join together to win back our elections.