Democracy

The L.A. City Council took one more step today to put the CALPIRG and Common Cause supported measure on the ballot.  This means Angelenos would see this question on the ballot in May:

Shall the Voters adopt a resolution that there should be limits on political campaign spending and that corporations should not have the constitutional rights of human beings and instruct Los Angeles elected officials and area legislative representatives to promote that policy through amendments to the United States Constitution?

New report reviews and grades the nation’s thirty largest cities on how effectively they allow the public to track budgets, contracting, subsidies, grants and requests for quality-of-life services.

L.A. City Council voted to move ahead with an initiative for the May ballot that would allow voters to weigh-in on the unlimited campaign spending that is a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

This week, the Los Angeles City Council is voting on whether or not to give voters the opportunity to weigh-in on the Citizen’s United ruling.

“Despite months of hand-wringing about a supposed young voter enthusiasm gap,” said CALPIRG State Director Emily Rusch, “yesterday’s results show that young people are willing to engage in our democracy, particularly if encouraged to do so.”

CALPIRG applauds our State Supreme Court and Fair Political Practices Commission for taking a stand against the secret campaign contributions pervading our elections in California and across the country. This lack of transparency is particularly concerning with the recent track record of extremely wealthy donors and corporations deciding to invest millions of dollars to influence the outcomes of California elections. 

A new analysis of pre-election data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and other sources by CALPIRG and Demos shows that outside spending in the first presidential election since Citizens United is living up to its hype: new waves of “outside spending” have been fueled by dark money and unlimited fundraising from a small number of wealthy donors.