Political Quotes

“I rise this morning to join Chairman Leahy's eloquent and inspiring remarks of yesterday and express my strong disagreement with the Supreme Court's decision released last week in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. In this astonishing decision, the slimmest of 5-to-4 majorities overturned legal principles that have been in place since Theodore Roosevelt's administration. The five Justices who make up the Court's conservative bloc opened floodgates that had for over a century kept unlimited spending by corporations from drowning out the voices of the American people. It would be hard to call this decision anything other than judicial activism. Let me start by reminding my colleagues of the long history of successful and appropriate regulation of corporate influence on elections. Federal laws restricting corporate spending on campaigns have a long pedigree. The 1907 Tillman Act restricted corporate spending on campaigns. Various loopholes have come and gone since, but the principle embodied in that law more than 100 years ago--that inanimate business corporations are not free to spend unlimited dollars to influence our campaigns for office--was an established cornerstone of our political system.”