Posted: January 21, 2022
Updated: January 24, 2022
by Matthew Rothschild, Executive Director
(These are Matt’s prepared remarks for the virtual press conference at 10:00 a.m. this morning.)
Good morning, I’m Matt Rothschild, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which since 1995 has been tracking and exposing the money in Wisconsin politics, and we’ve been advocating for a broad range of pro-democracy reforms, including banning gerrymandering and overturning Citizens United.
I’d like to thank Rep. Subeck and Senator Smith and Senator Larson for their consistent, courageous, and visionary leadership on the crucial issue of campaign finance reform.
We’re here today because it’s the 12th anniversary of the disastrous Citizens United case, and Citizens United is really just shorthand for a whole series of ruinous Supreme Court decisions that have allowed corporations and the super-rich to dominate our political arena.
So it’s time to give every Wisconsinite the opportunity to weigh in on the vital question of whether we should amend the U.S. Constitution to proclaim, once and for all, that corporations aren’t actually persons, and money actually isn’t speech, and that the voices of regular people shouldn’t be drowned out by those of the corporations and the super-rich.
Let’s pass this joint resolution. Let’s at least get a hearing for this joint resolution. On many issues today, the majority party in the Legislature in Wisconsin doesn’t even want to hear from We, the People.
That’s got to end. Let’s have a public hearing, and let’s have a vote.
Citizens United essentially gave birth to the SuperPACs and wet-nursed a huge rise in independent expenditures. Nationally, in 2020, some of the richest Americans threw obscene amounts of money around:
In 2020, the top spenders were:
Sheldon and Miriam Adelson: $215 million
Michael Bloomberg: $98 million
Richard Uihlein: $65 million.
By the way, Richard Uihlein, head of the Uline Corporation, is the leading SuperPAC donor for this year’s elections, having spent $8,200,000 already, according to opensecrets.org.
And here in Wisconsin, independent expenditures for non-federal races went up a whopping 800 percent in the 11 years since Citizens United, compared to the previous 11 years. From 1998-2009, independent expenditures in Wisconsin totaled $17,650,826. From 2010-2021, they totaled $138,166,187.
These obscene amounts of money almost totally sideline the average citizen, who obviously doesn’t have millions of dollars or even thousands of dollars to toss around.
As a result, the political arena has become essentially a gated community, an exclusive playground for the super-rich and the corporations, and We, the People of Wisconsin, are pretty much reduced to the role of spectators, and sometimes blindfolded spectators at that because we don’t know who is paying for all the mud that’s splattering on our screens during election season.
This election year again, here in Wisconsin, we can expect fundraising records to be broken in the U.S. Senate race and in the race for governor, with $100 million or more spent on each race.
And just because Democrats in Wisconsin have figured out how to play the money game doesn’t make this game any cleaner, any fairer, any more transparent, or any more participatory.
In a democracy, politics shouldn’t be a game played primarily by the super-rich and the corporations. In a democracy, we’re all supposed to be equal participants. That’s what one person, one vote is all about. We’re all supposed to have an equal say. And we just don’t.
And because our voices are drowned out by the super-rich and the corporations, then We, the People of Wisconsin, aren’t getting what we want. We aren’t getting what we want because of gerrymandering, and we aren’t getting what we want because of Citizens United.
And until we solve these two huge problems, we can’t, with any truthfulness whatsoever, claim to live in a healthy democracy.