Democratic group sues to enforce Citizens United

The number 2 boogeyman for Democrats these past few years has got to be the Citizens United decision, right after public enemy number 1, the Koch brothers. So fraught was the President over the idea that people could exercise their rights to association and speech at the same time, that he ignorantly called out the Supreme Court justices to their faces. Democrats recently mobilized to push a constitutional amendment to turn back Citizens United by curtailing the First Amendment. But that’s all just for show, right? No Democrat is going to forgo campaign funds no matter what form that funding takes.

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Now a Democratic group is suing to make sure Citizens United is enforced at the state level in places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where state governments have been slow to acknowledge that campaign finance law has moved on.

General Majority PAC, created last year by longtime Reid Senate chief of staff Susan McCue, has won legal challenges in New Jersey and Pennsylvania over the past year to enforce the Supreme Court ruling permitting unlimited corporate and union spending.

The successful lawsuits essentially have created the equivalent of super PACs at the state level and are part of a larger transformation of election law in the past few years as the dizzying changes at the federal level eventually creep down into state election law. […]

“Regardless of what one may think of Citizens United, these lawsuits were an important effort to clarify the law in those states that did not amend their statutes after the decision,” said Marc Elias, an attorney for General Majority PAC.

That’s a pretty big change for the case that the President once described as “not just a threat to Democrats — that’s a threat to our democracy.” This is being run by some of Sen. Reid’s people, so of course they’re happy to tie it all together:

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General Majority is working “to counteract the bottomless pockets of people like the Koch brothers,” Levy said, referring to the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who have helped finance Republican groups. “Led by our partners from labor, we beat them in New Jersey, and we expect to keep taking the fight to them wherever it’s needed.”

Hypocrisy, you understand, is for little people. Democrats want the money. They’ll pretend to dislike Citizens United, rail against it publicly, and then go back to quietly forming super PACs of their own.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
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