On the recordApril 29, 2010
I rise to support the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act, or the DISCLOSE Act, Senator Schumer's bill to fight the effects of the Citizens United decision. I want to tell Minnesotans listening at home why I support this bill. I want to talk about the problem this bill addresses and how this bill fixes that problem. I also want to talk about a part of this legislation that came from a bill I introduced earlier this year. A lot of people don't follow the Supreme Court very closely, so I would like to summarize what the Citizens United decision does. In a nutshell, it allows corporations to spend as much money as they want, whenever they want, in any election in this country. It lets corporations spend their shareholder money to do this. What is worse, it will allow foreign subsidiaries, wholly owned by foreign governments, to spend just as much money as their American competitors. This decision changed our election laws in a radical way. In a single decision, the Supreme Court reversed a century-old legal standard, 2 Federal laws, 24 State laws, including a 20-year-old Minnesota law, and 2 of its own decisions, one of which it handed down just 6 years ago. I am not a lawyer and I don't speak Latin, but unless the term ``stare decisis'' means ``overrule stuff,'' I think we have an activist court on our hands.
