Bill drew our attention this weekend to a piece by AlterNet‘s Steven Rosenfeld, who wrote about a conference at UCLA’s School of Law called “A 28th Amendment?” Rosenfeld called the conference “the most detailed, ambitious and encouraging discussion of exactly how to approach campaign finance and lobbying reform that I’ve seen in two decades of reporting on the decline of American democracy.”
The conference was, of course, held after an election that showed widespread popular opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and the deluge of political money spent in swing states. The UCLA conference took a look at whether a Constitutional amendment is the best way to counter the SCOTUS decision.
What was most striking about the UCLA gathering was how participants took the two rallying cries that have fueled nationwide protests, “Money is not speech” and “Corporations are not people,” and analyzed and turned them into a deepening array of constitutional and other remedies that not only target democracy’s building blocks, but are backed up by public pressure.
Read Rosenfeld’s entire post on AlterNet.
