[EL] Clinton supported DISCLOSE Act?

[Sean Parnell]

I’m not sure it’s right to say Hillary Clinton “supported” the DISCLOSE Act, as she was Secretary of State during the time that was an issue and by and large kept quiet on domestic policy issues (which is common and IMHO advisable for a SoS). It may just be a matter of the tense in the article being wrong or perhaps she did share her views at the time on this issue, but I’m not aware of it if she did.

 

 

Sean Parnell

President, Impact Policy Management, LLC

571-289-1374 (c)

sean at impactpolicymanagement.com

Alexandria, Virginia

 

 

 

Posted in  <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=10> campaign finance


 <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=72042> Jamie Raskin on Hillary Clinton and a Constitutional Amendment to Overturn Citizens United


Posted on  <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=72042> April 27, 2015 7:26 am by  <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3> Rick Hasen

 <http://www.salon.com/2015/04/27/scalia_and_roberts_dont_know_best_heres_how_we_take_our_politics_back_from_reactionary_court_and_billionaire_donors/> Jamie in Salon:

The country’s most prolific voting rights scholar and blogger, Richard Hasen—a colleague and friend of mine—is the most recent legal academic to  <http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/04/hillary_clinton_and_campaign_finance_the_democratic_front_runner_s_suggestion.html> pour cold water all over the movement for a constitutional amendment to rebuild the statutory wall protecting democratic elections from the flood of plutocratic and corporate wealth.  This is the wall that has been mostly demolished by the Roberts Court in both Citizens United and the McCutcheon decision….

Thankfully there is no talk of hypocrisy in Hasen’s critique, but still all Clinton gets from him is a lot of negative energy.  First, he faults her for not trying to fix “the nation’s disclosure laws,”  which is strange because she supported the Disclose Act, which U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen introduced and which Republicans killed, and she has always championed disclosure.  It is also strange because Clinton is clearly treating a constitutional amendment as a last resort in a struggle against a runaway faction of five plutocrats on the Supreme Court.  If I am reading her correctly, Clinton wants unaccountable corporate money—which is now spent by CEOs in our political campaigns on a secret basis and without any consumer, shareholder or citizen control over it—to be subject to public regulation “even if it takes” a constitutional amendment. That doesn’t sound so reckless to me.

For Hasen, it seems sufficient to work for years or decades to mandate disclosure of the billions of dollars in corporate money coursing through the veins of the body politic, and then leave things at that.  He is afraid that actually restoring the power of Congress to impose “reasonable” and viewpoint-neutral limits on corporate political expenditures would be subject to an effective judicial veto through reinterpretation by “a conservative majority on the Roberts Court” and therefore useless.  Well, it is also the case that the addition of the words “equal protection” to the Constitution were effectively nullified through reinterpretation by a Jim Crow Supreme Court between Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education(1954).  But does that make passage of the Fourteenth Amendment a bad idea?  The Supreme Court has been a conservative and reactionary institution for most of our history, but that is precisely the reason for the people to write our Constitution in a way that advances and protects strong democracy. Having the right constitutional language in place may not be sufficient to constrain the reactionary elitism of the Supreme Court, but it is certainly necessary.

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