04/20/2012
VICTORY! Yesterday the House passed the Citizens United resolution, making Vermont the third state to formally instruct Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court's decision of two years ago that said corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on election campaigns.
Let me give you an idea of what this campaign was like. Throughout January, I spent my Saturday mornings at the town dump in 10-degree weather and many weekday evenings in an overheated gym watching the 8th grade girls basketball team—all as part of my job.
Along with organizers in 65 other Vermont towns, I was collecting signatures on a petition to the local selectboard (town council) to put an item on our Town Meeting agenda that was a populist rebuke of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ludicrous assertion that money is speech.
Today those cold mornings and hot evenings paid off when the Vermont House of Representatives passed overwhelmingly a resolution already approved by the state Senate that calls on Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s decision of two years ago in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to elect or defeat public officials.
The House victory was by a vote of 92-40, a healthy margin but nowhere near the 26-3 margin of victory in the Senate last week. and came after two hours of debate. In passing the resolution, Vermont now joins New Mexico and North Carolina in making this request of Congress..
Each chamber debated the measure for two hours, and time and again proponents of the measure bolstered their legal arguments with the fact that voters had approved it, usually by large majorities, in 64 of the 65 towns where it was on the Town Meeting agenda. Opponents recognized the strength of that argument by repeated trying to diminish its significance by noting that the wording of the resolution varied (slightly) among the different town meetings or was modified (slightly) on the floor of the meeting.
Most legislators appeared to regard such arguments as distinctions without a difference.
Indeed, many argued the problem was not just with unlimited independent expenditures but also with the growing role of money in politics in general, and the specific failure of their own legislature to adopt meaningful campaign finance reforms.
For me the highlight of the date was when Rep. Sarah Buxton, D-Tunbridge, said when referring to the Town Meeting votes, referred to “our friends and neighbors taking the form of natural persons…” poking fun at the assertions by the defenders of the Supreme Court’s decision was that corporations are entitled to free speech pprotections because established legal precedent says that corporations are “persons.”
This uprising against corporate domination of our elections crossed ideological boundaries as well. I live in what is regard as a very conservative town, but I found that if I could get people to stand still in the 10-degree weather at the dump to hear me out about why I was asking them to sign a petition, they jumped at the chance. I got comebacks like, “You bet I’ll sign that,” and “By Jeezum, I’ll sign.” For every one who declined, I got 15 signatures.
After the vote at our town meeting, which was a loud chorus of ‘Yays’ against two weak and lonely ‘Nays,’ the town’s leading liberal activist came up to congratulate me, and said “In all my years here, I’ve never seen anything like this.” I thanked him and said I thought it was the issue itself that did the work for us.
This is how it begins, this is how we begin to restore our democracy, right at the grassroots, even if in Vermont in January the grass roots were frozen.
