The Washington Post reports, Dems threaten Kochs with a constitutional amendment (h/t DonkeyHotey):
Congressional Democrats escalated their fight against the Koch Brothers and other megadonors to political campaigns on Thursday, calling anew for a constitutional amendment to reverse recent Supreme Court campaign-finance decisions and setting a date for a hearing.
Majority Leader Harry Reid announced plans Thursday to hold floor votes on legislation that would “grant Congress the authority to regulate and limit the raising and spending of money for federal political campaigns.”
The amendment idea was first introduced by Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico. After Reid’s announcement, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont announced there would be a hearing on the legislation on June 3. [Leahy Announces June 3 Hearing On Constitutional Amendment To Rein In Massive Campaign Spending]
The announcements follows the court’s recent McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decision, which declared aggregate limits on campaign contributions in elections to be unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment. Coupled with the Citizens United decision of 2010, Leahy and Reid said Congress must respond.
“The Court has repeatedly used the First Amendment – not to protect the voices of all Americans, but as an instrument to amplify the voices of billionaires and corporations,” Leahy said in a statement Thursday. “Those voices are not the only ones who the Founding Fathers intended the First Amendment to protect. They meant for the First Amendment to protect the voices of all Americans.”
There is, of course, no chance that the Senate will find the two-thirds majority needed to refer a constitutional amendment to the states. Tea-Publicans cry crocodile tears whenever Sen. Reid talks smack about their lords and masters in the Plutocracy for whom these Tea-Publican bootlickers do their bidding.
This is the beginning of a long-term process of building a public consensus for a constitutional amendment, and laying down a litmus test for any Supreme Court Justice nominees in the future. The line of cases from Buckley v. Valeo (1976) to McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) were wrongly decided by a conservative activist court and need to be overturned, if not by a constitutional amendment, then by a more enlightened Supreme Court in the future.
The American Bridge 21st Century Foundation is creating a research and rapid-response war room to answer attacks on Democrats from the billionaire bastard Koch brothers and the candidates they’re backing. American Bridge launches Koch project:
American Bridge 21st Century Foundation on Thursday will announce a research and rapid-response digital project aimed at the Koch brothers, launching with a national and D.C. cable ad buy and three full-time staffers.
American Bridge founder and chairman David Brock called the project “a research-and-communications, first-of-its-kind war room that’s targeting the Koch brothers and also the GOP candidates who are benefiting” from their spending.
”Senator Reid and the Senate leadership have raised this as an issue,” Brock said in an interview with “Open Mike”. “This is the party of Koch, and we want Americans to understand what that means in their daily lives. It will basically have two aspects to it. One is expose and rebut … their self-serving policy agenda, not only nationally, but in the states.”
Brock added, “Secondly, we’re going to do some really deep-dive research into Koch industries and related entities and their businesses practices. And at the end of the day what we’re going to show is that the Kochs are leaders of a freakish ideological cult that is designed to rig the system to their benefit and to rob Americans of Social Security and decent wages. … I think that the Kochs don’t view their investments politically as investments in the country but in their companies.”
The American Bridge project has launched a website, Real Koch Facts, and is running ads which introduce the Kochs and their agenda: “supporting tax cuts for the wealthy, weakening Medicare, and eliminating the minimum wage at the expense of working families.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXph_nJxdgs]