Harry Reid's Proposed Amendment

What are we talking about?

Eta: I didnt think congress was in session

Amendment on what?

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DrunkerThanThou

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Ahhh, that explains it

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IIRC, this was some form of change to the First Amendment to limit free speech in response to Citizens United.

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Are you telling me there was an amendment to the 1st up for a vote and it wasnt fricking everywhere?

Ahh gotcha. Well still. I dont think i heard more than a few words about this. Thought it had more time before a vote.

My understanding was that the bill laid the groundwork to go after/ban corporations from engaging in political speech.

It was pitched as a bill to end corporations from using their money to influence elections... But its so open ended, that the bill COULD be used to even go after SNL for satirizing of politics.

I'm all for campaign finance reform... but there are ulterior motives at play here. No Dem said shite, when Obama was bringing in millions for his campaign. Not a single one of them cared where it came from.


Essentially, this election cycle... the sentiment of the nation isn't on the Dem's side..... so the obvious thing to do is change laws to try and mitigate their losses in this election cycle.

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DrunkerThanThou

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Nuh uh.

I've wondered this. If they overturned Citizens United, would we default back to McCain-Feingold Act when it comes to campaign finance rules?

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A majority of the United States Senate has voted to advance a constitutional amendment to restore the ability of Congress and the states to establish campaign fundraising and spending rules with an eye toward preventing billionaires and corporations from buying elections.

“Today was a historic day for campaign finance reform, with more than half of the Senate voting on a constitutional amendment to make it clear that the American people have the right to regulate campaign finance,” declared Senator Tom Udall, the New Mexico Democrat who in June proposed his amendment to address some of the worst results of the Supreme Court’s interventions in with the recent Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decisions, as well as the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it’s going to take more than a majority to renew democracy.

Fifty-four senators, all Democrats and independents who caucus with the Democrats, voted Thursday for the amendment to clarify in the Constitution that Congress and the states have the authority to do what they did for a century before activist judges began intervening on behalf of wealthy donors and corporations: enact meaningful campaign finance rules and regulations.

But forty-two senators, all Republicans, voted no. As a result, Udall noted, the Republican minority was able to “filibuster this measure and instead choose to support a broken system that prioritizes corporations and billionaires over regular voters.”

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The Nation

The ACLU's take:

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The American Civil Liberties Union strongly opposes S.J. Res. 19, a proposed constitutional amendment, sponsored by Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), that would severely limit the First Amendment, lead directly to government censorship of political speech and result in a host of unintended consequences that would undermine the goals the amendment has been introduced to advance—namely encouraging vigorous political dissent and providing voice to the voiceless, which we, of course, support.

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Recognizing both the severe harm to political debate through overbroad laws that suppress all
issue advocacy mentioning a candidate for office, and the difficulty in making principled
distinctions between issue and express advocacy under a totality of the circumstances approach,
the courts have rightly rejected measures that allow the government to restrict issue advocacy at all.

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Rather than “equalizing” the debate and giving voice to the voiceless, laws that allow
criminalization of issue advocacy— which this, on its face, would permit—actually give the
advantage to special interests with significant resources, because they can now call on the law to regulate their policy opponents. By exempting this class of political speech from the scope of
the First Amendment (and potentially other rights), it would provide no protection at all for disfavored minority groups on both the left and right.

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LINK