Organizers seeking to overturn the Supreme Court's so called “Citizens United” ruling are going to give it another try in Washington State. The group WAmend has filed an intuitive to the state legislature to urge the U-S Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling.
Campaign Director for the group, Gabe Myer, explains how that Supreme Court ruling prohibited regulating monetary donations to political campaigns. Meyer says the end result is big money plays an even bigger role in elections that it did before the ruling.
Meyer: “Every issue we deal with from taxes to the environment we have a corporate and business interest, and the business are much more influential than the people, also as you have seen in the primary, it’s who can raise the most money.”
The group had organized a similar citizen’s initiative last year, but Meyer says they ran out of time before getting the required number of signatures. This time they are using a slightly different procedure by fling the initiative with the legislature.
Meyer: “But we have a lot more time, we have 9 months to get the same amount of signatures, last time we had 5 months, but it took some time to get going, we got that amount in 3 months.”
Last time they received 175,000 signatures. They will need to get 245,000 signatures this time, and expect to start signature gathering in April. If they are successful, the state legislature would send a resolution to Congress asking they amend the constitution.
Meyer says so far 16 other states have called on Congress for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court ruling. Such an amendment would require a two thirds majority in Congress, to be ratified by three quarters of the states.
