[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 766]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
                     OUR ELECTIONS ARE NOT FOR SALE

  (Ms. EDWARDS of Maryland asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. EDWARDS of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, Justice Brandeis got it right: 
democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but not both. 
And that's truer today as the United States Supreme Court just wiped 
away decades of legal precedent, allowing corporations to spend 
unlimited money from their treasuries in our elections.
  The American people already believe that corporate special interests 
and their lobbyists run the show around here. I mean, the halls are 
crawling with them. But that's not enough. Now the Court says to the 
big banks, the credit card companies, the drug companies and to the 
insurance companies, Hey, all bets are off, and it's open season. Our 
elections are for sale. So that's right. If the corporations don't like 
what this Congresswoman is doing, they'll just forget the voters, buy 
TV ads, send robocalls, send a lot of mail, and beat her in November.
  A law won't fix this. We have to fix it in the Constitution. So today 
I will introduce a constitutional amendment so that we, the people, can 
take back our elections and our democracy. This is not the People's 
House, Incorporated. We are the people. It's our House, it's our 
Constitution, and it's our elections. And we intend to take it back 
from the United States Supreme Court.

                          ____________________