Letter: Amendment needed to reverse campaign finance precedents – Eagle-Tribune

To the editor:

Christian Wade's recent article "Lawmakers spend big bucks" reveals the degree to which fundraising influences our state legislators.

The necessity of building up a campaign war chest forces them to ask themselves what policies their major donors might prefer, rather than asking themselves what policies might be best for the majority of their constituents.

Thus we end up with government of, by and for the wealthy.

This problem was created by a series of anti-democratic U.S. Supreme Court rulings, such as Citizens United v. Federal Electron Commission (2010), that have opened the floodgates to big money in politics.

The constitutionality of state limits on campaign fundraising and spending has also been called into question by a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, American Tradition Partnership Inc. v. Bullock (2012), which nullified a 100-year-old Montana law called the Corrupt Practices Act that had kept corporate money out of state politics for a century.

Only a constitutional amendment can overturn flawed Supreme Court decisions. Please ask your state representative and state senator to support the We the People Act (H.3208 and S.2163), which would have Massachusetts join five other states (Vermont, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island) in proposing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to overturn Citizens United v. FEC and other anti-democratic Supreme Court rulings based on the doctrines that political spending is a form of First Amendment speech and that artificial incorporated entities have inalienable rights, as if they were real people.

Paul Lauenstein

Sharon

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Letter: Amendment needed to reverse campaign finance precedents - Eagle-Tribune