WASHINGTON - Oregon

and six other Democrats charged Tuesday that modern political campaigns - and democracy itself - are threatened by a pair of "awful" Supreme Court decisions that can only be fixed by changing the U.S. Constitution itself.

The senators said during a news conference that adding a new provision to the Constitution is necessary if Congress wants to

and a

"In the mid-70s the activist Supreme Court opened the flood gates to allow special interest money to flow into our elections by falsely equating money with speech," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said, referring to the case Buckley v Valeo.

That case was followed last year by Citizens United v Federal Election Commission which opened the way to a surge of campaign spending by corporations, interest groups and labor unions.

Schumer called Citizens United "Buckley on steroids - which really took the First Amendment to an illogical, almost anti-democratic extreme. These are awful decisions that need to be overturned."

But to overturn them, the Constitution must be changed to explicitly give Congress the power to govern campaign spending. That authority has been diminished as a result of those two cases, the senators said.

The amendment aims to accomplish three goals. It would:

Authorize Congress to regulate and limit the raising and spending of money for federal political campaigns and allow states to regulate such spending at their level;

Include the authority to regulate and limit independent expenditures, such as those from Super PACs, made in support of or opposition to candidates;

Not dictate any specific policies or regulations, but instead would allow Congress to pass campaign finance reform legislation that withstands constitutional challenges.

Merkley said the flood of unregulated money into campaigns has given wealthy people and organization far too much power.

"It goes agains the very nature of democracy founded on one person, one vote," he said at the news conference.

He also tried to put the new circumstance into real numbers.

"ExxonMobil announced last week that in the third quarter they made over $10 billion in profit. If it allocated just four hours of that profit to political advertising it would have spent more money than both candidates spent in my 2008 Senate campaign; the most expensive Senate campaign in Oregon history," he said.

"If we turn the clock back to 2008 and take ExxonMobil's profits from 2008, 3 percent of that profit would have exceed all the money spent in the presidential campaign by every party. This is indeed a stadium sound system drowning out the voice the people. We cannot let that stand," Merkley said.

Both decisions led to gushers of money flowing into campaigns, but the Citizens United decision holds the potential for unprecedented levels of spending. Of $9.3 million in campaign spending from outside groups in the 2010 election cycle, $5.7 million could be directly traced to the groups operating under rules created by Citizens United, the non-partisan

said.

There was also a direct, on-the-ground case in Oregon. A New York financier ultimately poured $750,000 into the the

. The money was used primarily for TV ads that resulted in the closest race for the veteran Democrat in years.

The senators agreed that special interests deserve to be heard just like regular votes. But the balance has shifted in a dangerous way.

"I don't know a single person in Rhode Island; I don't know a single person anywhere else for that matter who feels that corporations are having a hard time making their influence felt in our government," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who joined Merkley and Schumer and Sens. Dick Durbin and Tom Udall at the news conference. Sens. Michael Bennett of Colorado and Tom Harkin of Iowa also support the amendment.

"Because it is a Supreme Court decision and because it is based on the Constitution we can't change it legislatively. So the only avenue to correct what the Supreme Court right-wing bloc has done is to go to the source document itself, the Constitution and put more clearly what the founders obviously must have intended," he said.

While the problem may be real,

More than

In order to succeed, the senators' amendment must pass both the House and Senate with a two-thirds vote. Once that is done, it must be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

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