Political Quotes

“I thank Senator Whitehouse, Senator Schumer, and all those who have been working so hard on this enormously important issue which has everything to do with whether our country remains the kind of democracy most of us want it to be. I come to the Senate floor today to express my profound disgust with the current state of our campaign finance system and to call for my fellow Senators, as a short-term effort, to pass the DISCLOSE Act. Passing the DISCLOSE Act would be an important step forward, but clearly we have much more to do on this issue. Long term, of course, we need a constitutional amendment to overturn this disastrous Supreme Court decision--the Citizens United 5-to-4 decision of 2 years ago. Long term, in my view, we also need to move this country toward public funding of elections so that once and for all big money will not dominate our political process. Long term, there is no question in my mind that Citizens United will go down in history as one of the worst decisions ever rendered by a U.S. Supreme Court. Five members of the Court came to the bizarre conclusion that corporations should be treated as if they were people; that they have a first amendment right to spend as much money as they want to buy candidates, to buy elections. Somehow, in the midst of all of this unbelievable amount of spending millions and millions of dollars, the Supreme Court came to the conclusion this would not even give the appearance of corruption.…”