[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 31 (Tuesday, February 28, 2012)]
[House]
[Page H971]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, it's interesting listening to the 
fantasy Republican talking points. The fact is we are now drilling more 
oil in the United States than ever before. The inconvenient facts get 
in the way of political talking points. But what is not a fantasy is 
what is happening on the political screen.
  In the final 3 months of 2011, the campaign to reelect President 
Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised $68 million, an 
impressive sum, all the more impressive because it was donated by 
583,000 Americans who gave an average of $55 each. But earlier this 
month, at a retreat at the exclusive Renaissance Esmeralda Resort in 
southern California, the conservative billionaire Koch brothers said 
they would donate a combined $60 million to super PACs to defeat 
President Obama. Two billionaire brothers with opinions radically at 
variance with most of America are poised to cancel out the efforts of 
half a million American citizens.
  To understand this gross perversion of the political process, we 
don't have to wait for the general election and the avalanche of 
negative campaign ads against the President. We can look right now at 
the primary election for the Republican Presidential nomination, where 
we've seen a handful of billionaires and their super PACs outspend all 
the Republican candidates and help turn that contest into a circus.
  The sad reality is that the super PACs have shaped the political 
campaign more than the candidates. That's the world we live in since 
the Supreme Court's tragic decision in Citizens United, which 
overturned a century of settled law and opened this floodgate of 
unlimited campaign spending, drowning out small donors and individuals 
that most of us learned in school were the cornerstone of our 
democracy. This Supreme Court ruling was based on the perverse idea 
that the Court's out-of-touch majority somehow felt corporations should 
enjoy the same constitutional rights as people. This threatens the 
integrity of the political process, not just from the appearance of 
corruption, but actually, blatantly, distorting the process.
  As companies and sham independent organizations that are actually run 
by candidates' friends and employees blanket the airwaves with an 
avalanche of vicious negative advertising, now somehow they are 
protected under a First Amendment right of free speech which would be 
beyond the comprehension of our Founding Fathers. Mitt Romney may 
believe that corporations are people, but do the rest of us need a 
comedian like Steven Colbert to remind us that only people are people?
  There's an outside chance of relief from a century-old Montana law 
banning corporate corruption in their political landscape, which was 
passed after the most egregious and well-documented abuse in Montana. A 
case about this law would provide the Supreme Court a lifeline to climb 
down from the precarious and dangerous constitutional ledge, a ledge 
that they have not only crawled out onto, but they dragged the American 
people and the political process with them with their Citizens United 
decision.
  There's a chance that the Supreme Court will use this Montana law to 
reestablish the basic parameters protecting the political process from 
the corruption of vast sums of unregulated corporate money. But in the 
meantime, it's important that we advance a constitutional amendment 
that would eliminate the notion of corporate personhood, explicitly 
stating that the rights of natural persons may only be afforded to real 
people, not corporations.
  As we work to overturn Citizens United and ban corporate personhood, 
people should not have to wait to judge whether a candidate is 
representing the public or representing their benefactors. We should 
pass the DISCLOSE Act, H.R. 4010, to require political spending by 
corporations and individuals to be fully transparent. We should be 
unstinting in other efforts in the regulatory and legal process to make 
sure that shareholders of corporations have an opportunity to at least 
know, and maybe even have a say, about what the corporations that they 
are supposed to own are doing on their behalf. We should support H.R. 
1404, the Fair Elections Now Act, to promote public campaign financing 
to ensure the public's voice is not drowned out by moneyed special 
interests.
  The Supreme Court's decision on Citizens United was based on fantasy, 
the fantasy that vast sums of money from hidden special interest are 
not inherently corrupted; the fantasy that corporations should be 
afforded all the rights of citizens; the fantasy that super PACs run by 
individuals who are the closest allies, friends, and employees of 
candidates are somehow independent.
  What is not a fantasy is what we see right now on the political 
landscape, the terrifying effect of super PACs and the flood of money 
hopelessly distorting the campaigns. We should all fight to change it.

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