Last week’s decision in Citizens United was an important moment in the

history of our democracy. Much more important, however, is how we respond.

There was little surprise that the Court would reverse itself on the question
whether government can ban independent political expenditures by
corporations. The hints by this Supreme Court have been clear enough, and
this case was just the latest in a string of decisions by the Court cutting back on
Congress’s power to secure fair elections.

The surprise, and in my view, real cause for concern, however, was how little
weight the Court gave to the central purpose of any fair election law: the
purpose to protect the institutional integrity of the democratic process. That
value seemed invisible to this Court, as if we didn’t now live in a democracy in
which the vast majority has lost faith in their government.

We need to trust our democracy. We need to believe that its representatives are
guided if not by truth, then at least by what their constituents want. Our
Framers gave us a Republic in which the government was to be “dependent,”
as the Federalist Papers put it, “upon the People.” They were obsessed with
assuring that the government be independent of anything else.

But the vast majority of Americans do not believe that their government is
“dependent upon the People.” The vast majority believes the government is
dependent upon money. Most believe “money buys results in Congress.” Most
therefore doubt the integrity of this the most important democratic institution
established by our Framers.

This is a corruption — a corruption of the very institution of our democracy.

And this corruption makes it harder for both Reagan Republicans and
Progressive Democrats to achieve the substantive ends that each seeks. For 20
out of the last 29 years, we’ve had conservative Republican Presidents. But
Reagan Republicans have yet to see the size of government shrink, or the tax
code simplified — because Congress has no interest in smaller government or
simpler taxes, since both would make it harder to raise campaign funds.
Likewise, despite the election of Barack Obama with a super-majority
Democratic Congress, Progressive Democrats have watched with disgust as
every substantive reform of this administration has been stymied by special
interests expert in preserving the status quo.

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There is a great frustration in our country today. Rightfully so. The Obama
voters whose frustration was manifest as hopefulness in the last election, and
the Tea Partiers whose frustration has been manifest as resistance ever since,
now share a feeling that has no partisan nature: that decisions are no longer
made through the electoral process in America. That change occurs elsewhere,
on another axis, its direction controlled by a fortunate few who are neither
dependent upon, nor accountable to “the People.”

Our single common purpose must be to end this corruption. No side in this
debate has the right to demand rules that benefit them against the other. But all
sides need to recognize that this corruption is destroying American democracy.
We need a system that the people trust — that gives the people a reason to
participate, and convinces them that their participation is rewarded by the
substantive policies that they have pursued.

Long before Citizens United, America had already lost faith in the integrity of
its government. Had the other side prevailed, and the case come out the other
way, we would have lost faith still. That’s because even without the freedom of
corporations to spend money on political speech during the last days of a
election, the campaigns of Republicans and Democrats alike had become
dependent upon the money that the corporations, unions and other special
interests could supply. Whether through PACs, or large contributions bundled
by lobbyists, already these special interests have a powerful control over how
Washington works. They didn’t need this special gift from the Supreme Court.

We gain nothing if the response to Citizens United succeeds simply in reversing

its effect. There are many such proposals floating about in Congress now —
most prominently, one that would ban entities with government contracts (i.e.,
every big business) from spending corporate money on political speech. Such
reforms give us nothing because they simply return us to the corrupted
Congress that we already have. We need more than a return to the status quo
before Thursday. The status quo before Thursday was the problem.

Instead, we urgently need a reform movement to act in two complementing

ways — first, to enact the first step of the reforms we need to restore our
democracy, and second, to assure that those reforms not be vulnerable to the
increasing activism of this Supreme Court.

First, we need Congress to enact the Fair Elections Now Act — now. This
voluntary, opt-in system would create a hybrid of public funding and small
dollar contributions, and provide an immediate balance to the deluge of
corporate funding that this next election will now see. More importantly, it will
give candidates a way to fight that deluge without themselves becoming even
more dependent upon private, special interest funding. No other reform —

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including reforms that try effectively to reverse Citizens United — could be as
important just now. No other reform should distract us from pushing strongly
to get Congress to pass this statute now.

But after much reflection, I now believe that this first step is not enough. We
can’t build a movement to secure fundamental reform with the constant fear
that an activist Supreme Court will strike that reform down. Instead, we must
establish clearly and without question the power in Congress to preserve its
own institutional independence. And we can only do that by effecting a change
to our fundamental charter — an amendment to the Constitution.

Such an amendment must secure not one side in a political debate against the
other. It must instead give Congress the power to support its own elections in a
manner that secures its own independence. Members in Congress must be, and
must seem to Americans to be, free of any dependency upon lobbyists, or
fundraisers, and instead be dependent simply “upon the People.” We need an
amendment that gives Congress the power to secure this independence.

And we must start the process to make this change happen now. And as
Congress is hopelessly stalemated, our focus should not be upon a useless
effort to get that corrupted body to act. It must instead be to build the
movement to petition the states to call for a convention to propose
amendments to the Constitution. Any such proposal must still, like an
amendment proposed by Congress, be ratified by 38 states. But in the process
of building this movement, we can spread the understanding of why this
change is urgently needed, and how we can bring it about.

Passing an amendment will not, of course, be easy. But it will certainly be easier
than any number of other moments when Americans have responded to
political need with bold action. None of us will need to risk our lives to secure
this democracy — as our Framers did, as the soldiers fighting for the Union
did, as the greatest generation did defending America against tyranny. But we
who inherit their democracy must at least be willing to suffer the burden
necessary to get Americans to act. Fundamental change happens when America
has been awoken to its need. From the rallies of the Tea Party, to the
frustration of those in the majority in the last presidential election, America is
now awake.

Never in our lifetime has our democracy faced such a threat. Quick-fix
bandaids are not its remedy. We need a movement that commits to put aside
our own particular policy favorites and recognize that regardless of our
differences, we need a democracy we all can believe in.

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We don’t believe in this democracy now. We don’t believe in this Congress. We
need to restore the integrity of Congress so that we can believe once again in
this democracy. But Congress reforming Congress — through the very process
we all know has been hopelessly corrupted — simply won’t be enough to erase
the stain that blights our politics now. We need an amendment that speaks to
the fundamental commitment of Americans — to this Republic, and its
democracy.

We will have one. Join us.

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