WATCH: Clinton Vows To Tackle Citizens United Within First 30 Days

Hillary Clinton announced that she plans to propose a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United. She plans to do this within her first thirty days as President of the United States.

She made the announcement during a video conference on Saturday, July 16, delivered to the attendees of the progressive Netroots Nation 2016 conference in St. Louis.

Clinton
Featured image via Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Mrs. Clinton paid homage to Bernie Sanders for making campaign finance reform a top issue during the campaign. In the speech she said:

“Now I know many of the people in this room supported Senator Sanders in the primary. I’m looking forward to hearing from you, learning from you, and working with you.”

She continued:

“You’ve helped put political and campaign finance reform at the top of the national agenda and I intend to keep it there. Today I’m announcing that in my first thirty days as president, I will propose a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and give the American people, all of us, a chance to reclaim our democracy.”

In an interview with POLITICO, Netroots Nation Executive Director, Raven Brooks, was surprised by Clinton’s announcement that she is picking up the baton from Sanders on campaign finance reform. He said:

“I don’t think there really was any thought or expectation that she would be carrying this issue forward. She’s adopted some of his other stuff. Notably some of the college and student debt things, but I thought campaign finance was going to be left behind.”

Citizens United v. FEC was the 2010 Supreme Court decision that determined, in a 5-4 decision, that the government could not limit private corporations from spending however much money they could amass on political campaigns.

In other words, it paved the way for the political money monstrosity known as the Super PAC.

In the Court’s dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said:

“At bottom, the Court’s opinion [speaking of the majority decision] is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

As if we needed another reason to rally behind Hillary Clinton in her campaign against a disconnected, policy-illiterate, litigious billionaire.

Watch Clinton address Netroots Nation 2016 here:

R.L. Paine is a writer, activist, and science lover. We all need to find a bit more Hitch in ourselves. “Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself...Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence...” - Christopher Hitchens