Michael Bennet: “I first wanted to acknowledge the severity of the challenges we face as a country right now, whether it is military…”

“I first wanted to acknowledge the severity of the challenges we face as a country right now, whether it is military action to stop the threat of ISIS or the crisis in Ukraine. Colorado is waiting to hear from the President tonight. We are all concerned with that, as we should be. Today on the floor of the Senate is a proposed constitutional amendment. While it is on the floor I wanted to take a minute to talk about it. Tonight in Colorado, a swing State, families will endure an avalanche of political ads. Many of them will come from obscure interests with deceptive names such as America, Inc., the Government Integrity Fund Action Network, something called Citizens for a Working America, and so on and so forth. There will be no way to tell who these folks are, because under the laws of the United States many of these organizations do not have any obligation to disclose where their money comes from, a privileged status that individual Americans do not have when it comes to funding political campaigns. It is enough to make everyone in our State, in Colorado, hate their TV, much less American politics, and probably not in that order. In Washington, on the other hand, which--I guess I should say only in Washington, which has become a Disneyland when it comes to any sense of reality, there are people defending the current system--the current campaign finance system--on the grounds that it is a great victory for free speech and a great victory for our democracy.…”