Renewing Democracy After Citizens United

April 26, 2010
Money in Politics
Susan M. Liss

Citizens United shook all who care about American democracy. But even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical ruling handed vast new power to corporations and their allies, it was plain: our political system is broken. This publication explains what fixes are necessary to have in place in order to renew our democracy.

Full Report (PDF)
The Challenge
 

Introduction

Citizens United shook all who care about American democracy. But even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical ruling handed vast new power to corporations and their allies, it was plain: our political system is broken. The forces of the status quo are greater than anyone could have imagined. Congress is dysfunctional. Special interests have generated gridlock and blocked change. This past year showed that unless we repair our democracy, the progressive agenda will stall. Voters and their sentiments will be effectively silenced.

But Citizens United may be an inflection point—a moment where a Court-created constitutional crisis galvanizes a strong response. A populist mood is rumbling throughout the public. Some 80 percent of those polled oppose the Court’s ruling.1 An innovative, impassioned reply to this conservative judicial activism can help revive civic energy. We have no choice: faced with Citizens United, we must fight back.

To counter the looming flood of unlimited corporate political spending, we need nothing less than a long-term campaign to renew and
strengthen American democracy.

• First, by establishing small donor public financing for federal elections.

• Second, by bringing millions of new voters onto the rolls through a modernized registration system—starting in 2010.

• And third, by shaping a new jurisprudence that puts voters, and not corporations, at the center of the First Amendment.

These goals reinforce one another. They would boost participation and offer a bright vision of an engaged citizenry having the loudest voice in the halls of power. They build on hopeful new breakthroughs in Internet fundraising and voter mobilization. They reflect a “charisma of ideas” that can galvanize support.

The American story has been the struggle for a wider democracy, one waged by millions of ordinary citizens. We can write the next chapter in that story.

The Challenge: Our Dysfunctional Democracy

At its core, the ongoing economic crisis is a political crisis. Money-drenched politics, too few voters, and a retreat from the rule of law all created the conditions for collapse. Now these same factors combined make it much harder to fix the problems. Special interests very nearly derailed health care reform.2 Vocal pressure from energy companies led to the abandonment of “cap and trade.”3 Massive lobbying by Wall Street neutered financial reregulation. (All told, financial firms spent $3.3 billion on federal lobbying over the past decade.4) Other vital goals face similar daunting odds.

Americans are disaffected and disillusioned. According to one recent poll, only 28 percent believe that the federal government “is working well or okay.”5 Independent voters outnumber Republicans or Democrats in many states.6 Rising social movements dating back at least to Ross Perot’s candidacy in the early 1990s and culminating today in the rapid rise of angry Tea Party adherents show the frustration of many
Americans at a system that they believe works against them.

This disaffection is rooted in experience. Assured by their government that they were prosperous, typical American families saw real income drop even before the financial crash. Nearly all of the decade’s gains flowed to the very wealthy. Tax laws and financial deregulation played a glaringly visible role. The market collapse, startling bailouts and massive unemployment punctuated the broader story of widening inequality.

Citizens United is, in many ways, the “last straw” for a political system that had already ground to a gridlocked halt. In his eloquent dissent in the case, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that Americans citizens “may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy.”7