Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the DISCLOSE Act. Earlier this year, a majority of the Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent and struck down a whole series of reform laws limiting the influence of corporate money in elections. The court ruled that corporations are people, just like you and me, and have a corresponding absolute constitutional right to pump as much money as they want into our elections. It revived the fears of concentrated corporate powers, distorting our democratic process, fears that have been held by believers in a republican form of government from the days of Jefferson and Madison and Jackson. The very real danger now is that corporations will be able to use vast sums of concentrated money to further corrupt our political process and drown out the voices of everyone else. Without action, as a result of this latest activist Supreme Court decision, our electoral system will once again be at the mercy of large moneyed interests. This bill takes several critical steps to reclaim our elections. The most important one is that it would require disclosure by corporations and labor unions of donors providing money for political purposes in certain circumstances, and would mandate that corporate CEOs appear in company political ads to say that they ``approve this message,'' just as candidates would do.…”