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The Court’s action dramatically dilutes the vote and the voice of every American who does not control a large corporate treasury. The decision unleashes billions of dollars in corporate money to dominate legislatures and elections.

The American people can and should overrule the Citizens United decision, and restore the Constitution and fair elections to the people. The way to do that is by enacting and ratifying the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, which we call the People's Rights Amendment.

Isn’t amending the Constitution to change a Court decision an extreme step?

Whenever the American people have realized that our democracy is threatened, and voting and elections are no longer fair, we have always amended the Constitution to fix it.

Citizens United is the extreme result of a focused political effort in the past two or three decades to transform the First Amendment into a tool for corporations to avoid regulation and oversight by the American people. Before 1976, there was no such thing as protected “commercial speech” under the First Amendment. For the first two centuries of the American republic, corporations did not have First Amendment rights to limit the reach of democratically enacted regulations. And states and Congress could regulate or prevent corporate contributions and expenditures in elections.

A corporation is not just like any other association of people. A corporation is a specific creation of state or federal statute that may only be used for purposes defined by the state or federal statute that permitted the creation of the corporation. While Justice Scalia has claimed that corporations are like other associations of people, this is wrong. “Those who feel that the essence of the corporation rests in the contract among its members rather than in the government decree . . .

No. Citizens United v. FEC would never have been decided this way in any other era of the Court in our history. The five self-described conservatives on the current Court have cast aside a century of federal restrictions on corporate money in politics, and two centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence. The notion that a corporation has First Amendment rights to “speech” and political activity is contrary to the history, words, spirit and intent of the First Amendment and American self-government.

A sharply divided Supreme Court decided that the American people are powerless to stop corporations from using corporate funds to influence state and federal elections. The 5-4 decision ruled that the restrictions on corporate expenditures in elections contained in the federal Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (known as BCRA or “McCain-Feingold”) violated the First Amendment protections of free speech.