Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague and all the speakers today. This is the 16th anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It was a 5-4 ruling. This decision overturned longstanding precedent that we had in this country, where we had clearly established limits on independent political spending by corporations and billionaires, and it was working. For many years, political spending had essentially flattened out. Sometimes, it had gone down when it comes to the contributions of billionaires and the largest corporations, and we were able to have an election system where there was a lot of money in the system, but not to where we are today, where it has completely engulfed all of our actions and all of our campaigns. There has been so much damage caused by Citizens United, as many of my colleagues explained today. We are talking about wealthy donors now dictating election outcomes, potentially, with the amount of money they can flood into these elections. Americans have less information about who is influencing those campaigns and politicians. A lot of times, it is very easy to hide your contributions to these PACs and super-PACs. Because of that, we see a system now where we don't even know where the money is coming from. We see the names of some of these cleverly named PACs in the disclosures, but you can have PACs hiding PACs and chains of money.”