Thank you for this opportunity to submit testimony regarding the damage that Citizens United and the rise of Super PACs has done to our system of democratic government.  In the text below I will discuss why rules that govern the role of money in politics are important to our democracy; the impact of

Super PACs have fast become a favored tool for wealthy individuals and interests to drown out the voices of average citizens. 

Americans of all political backgrounds agree: there is way too much corporate money in politics. 

Outside spending organizations reported $1.11 billion in spending to the FEC through the final reporting deadline in the 2012 cycle. That’s already a 200% increase over total 2008 outside spending.

In 2012, just 61 large donors to Super PACs giving an average of $4.7 million each matched the $285.2 million in grassroots contributions from more than 1,425,500 small donors to the major party presidential candidates.

The extent of the money in politics problem, how we got here (from a legal perspective), and what we can do to create a democracy in which the strength of a citizen’s voice does not depend on the size of her wallet. 

This report offers a comprehensive analysis of the fundraising and spending in federal races in the 2012 elections.

In August 2011, Congress passed a strange piece of legislation intended to bind itself into the future. In spite of persistently high unemployment and an unremarkable deficit-to-GDP ratio, and in spite of public polling that consistently showed that creating jobs was  the American public’s top

McCutcheon struck down the limit on the total amount that one wealthy donor is permitted to contribute to all federal candidates, parties, and political action committees (PACs) combined.

Democracy has at its heart a basic promise: citizens have an equal voice in deciding who represents them.