As our recent poll [1]shows, 92% of Americans agree that Congress needs to take action to right the wrongs of the Citizens United decision. One way to start would be to pass a bill like the DISCLOSE Act to force big corporations to publicly reveal the money they spend to influence elections. Proponents of such legislation may worry that the corporate-leaning [2] Supreme Court will overturn the bill after it’s passed – but they shouldn’t worry too much. With the exception of Justice Thomas, none of the Supreme Court Justices have expressed hostility to disclosure requirements - in fact, the most well known conservative Justice on the Court may even be an advocate. As SCOTUSblog [3] pointed out in May, Justice Scalia has been a vocal supporter of transparency in democracy:
Justice Scalia [has] expressed the strong view that disclosure requirements do not implicate significant First Amendment concerns. To the concern that disclosure could deter expression, Justice Scalia responded, “[T]he fact is that running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage.”
This may be one of the only instances in which Justice Scalia is in line with the majority of Americans. As our recent poll [1]shows, 89% of Americans support the transparency legislation like the DISCLOSE Act, although many (62%) believe such legislation wouldn’t go far enough to correct the outrageous Citizens United decision.
The American people are right again: just forcing corporations to disclose their political activities can’t fix Citizens United’s dangerous assertion that the 1st amendment guarantees unlimited corporate spending on elections, and conservative Justices – Scalia included – are likely to overturn any legislation that would. That’s why 77% of Americans believe that we need a constitutional amendment to insure that our democratic system isn’t drowned in corporate money. And 74 % say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate for Congress who pledged to support a Constitutional Amendment limiting corporate spending on elections.
UPDATE: The Supreme Court has weighed in more on the value of political disclosure in today's decision in Doe v. Reed [4]. We'll post more on that later this morning.