this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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not just a bill, a constitutional amendment. this means it has absolutely zero chance of passing. it would need two-thirds of both the Senate and House, and then approval by 38 state legislatures.
and because Republicans control Congress at the moment, this won't even get a vote in committee, much less the full House. this is 100% performative. it's a press release from Jayapal's office, no more.
but here's the fun part - Jayapal has introduced this amendment before. here's the 2019 version, for example.
back in 2019, Democrats did control the House. they could have voted the amendment out of committee, and then given it a full vote on the House floor. they could have forced every member of the House to vote on the record about supporting or opposing Citizens United.
why didn't they? my guess is that a bunch of "moderate" Democrats would have ended up voting against the amendment, along with probably every single Republican, and it would have made Democrats look bad.
so much like abortion rights, Democrats enjoy having "Citizens United bad" as a campaign slogan, but when it comes to actually exercising political power when they have it, hey look at the time gotta go.
the other option to overturn Citizens United would have been to expand the Supreme Court to reverse its rightward shift. Biden claimed to be open to this idea...and then appointed a committee to study the problem. a committee made up of 35 members. which is pretty much straight out of the CIA sabotage manual. a committee of 35 people will starve to death trying to come to consensus on where to go for lunch. Biden appointing such a huge committee was a clear sign that he didn't intend to do anything about the problem.
but congrats to Rep. Jayapal, she probably was able to send some great fundraising emails about trying to overturn Citizens United.
Thank you. This is a good take down on the story. Maybe I oughta just delete.
edit: In reality I think your comment is too good to delete the whole post.
DO NOT DELETE THIS. The more people know about Citizen's United the better. Naming this decision as a lynchpin of our society's current troubles is something everyone needs to understand. Although our system has been rotted from the inside out due to this decision, preventing any established procedure from possibly removing it, people still need to understand that we can't have a government that runs on quid pro quo. Even if this can't be the way to solve the problem, more awareness means that more people may try more original approaches which could possibly work.