A growing transpartisan movement

We the people are marching, demonstrating, organizing. All across the country, people are turning out in droves at town halls, meetings, call-in shows, and demonstrations. People are mad: our democracy is in crisis and we are energized for action. But where to begin?

Joe Biden, as vice president, addressed the Generation Progress Summit, saying “If you could do only one single thing, only one, to increase fairness, equity, opportunity to the middle class, pass rational gun control, deal with immigration, etc. What would it be? I can tell you one thing I would do. It would be to get private money out of the political process.” Joe knows how things work in government, and we have our own Sen. Chris Coons on board with us… (Thank you, Chris.)

It’s the underlying issue: campaign cash. Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) have opened the floodgates to the corrupting influence of big money in our political campaigns. In a system where 95 percent of the time, the winning candidate is the one who spends the most money, every office holder at the national level must now spend over half of their working hours raising the vast sums of money needed to run a campaign. The day after the recent special election for a Delaware State Senate seat, Delaware Online reported $749,008 was spent to elect the winning candidate. That figure did not even include contributions made by unions or other groups. That is a lot of cash for a small state senate seat.

Polls indicate that 80 percent of our citizens are concerned about the role of money in politics. This is not a Republican or a Democratic problem, this is a democracy problem. There is a large pro-democracy movement taking root across the country. They want to put the rights of individual citizens and the interests of our country before the privileges of concentrated wealth, corporations, unions, political parties, and super PACs. Nationwide, 18 states and more than 700 communities have called for a 28th Amendment to the Constitution that would affirm that we the people – not big money, not unions, not corporations – govern the United States.

The impact of the 2010 Citizens United decision was clear in the 2012 elections, the most expensive in our country’s history up to that time. Seven months later, a letter dated June 6, 2013, and signed by a bipartisan majority of members of the Delaware General Assembly, called upon Congress to “…pass a constitutional amendment reversing the United States Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission…….[We] call upon our United States Congress to propose and send to the states for ratification as soon as is practical a constitutional amendment that reverses this decision, and that makes clear the right of our elected representatives and the American people to be steadfast in pursuit of fair elections and democratic sovereignty.”

Whether your top concern is climate change, shrinking the government, affordable healthcare, income inequality, gun violence, prison reform, a fair tax system, quality education, national security or the myriad of other issues facing our communities today – you are not being represented.

Let’s liberate our good representatives. Let’s give them back their real jobs. If they wanted to be fundraisers, they would have pursued that profession. Let’s get rid of those who like the status quo of a government beholden to special, moneyed interests and who are no longer dedicated to promoting the common good.

Call, write, email and visit your representatives. Tell them you want them to support a 28th Amendment to the Constitution giving us back our government. Talk to your friends, use your social media. Let’s make our voices heard.  We can fix this. We ended slavery. Women can vote. We recovered from the last Gilded Age. We can do this.

Sharon Kwiatkowski is a member of American Promise, a coalition of pro-democracy groups.