Monday’s Senate vote will be our last opportunity before Congress adjourns for the November election—and corporate interests flood the airwaves—to put our senators on the record of where they stand on this crucial issue.

Fifty senators (all Democrats & independents) have pledged to support Senate Joint Resolution 19, so we are targeting Republicans and the five undecided Democrats (Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Joe Donnelly, Tim Kaine & Mark Warner).

On Tuesday, over 30,000 Daily Kos members who live in a state with one or more undecided senators sent a quick e-mail urging their support—but now we’re asking for more.

As we learned in our net neutrality campaign, personalized messages are far more persuasive and effective than form letters.

In a meeting with net neutrality advocates that my colleague Rachel Colyer attended, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler made it clear that personal comments from real people, telling real stories about how the end of net neutrality would impact them personally, are the comments he reads and gives the most credence to.

Our Daily Kos community has been very effective in pushing for net neutrality, as an excellent analysis by the Sunlight Foundation of public comments to the Federal Communications Commission recently proved. Not only did Daily Kos form letters account for 10 percent of all public comment—but a staggering forty percent of all comments to the FCC on net neutrality were personalized (as opposed to form letters), which is four times the normal rate.



It’s difficult to know why, exactly, more members of the public apparently wrote letters themselves in this rulemaking than is typical for large dockets. It could be an indicator of a genuinely higher level of personal investment and interest in this issue, or perhaps this docket drew organizers who employed different "get out the comment" techniques than we have seen in the past.

Guilty as charged. Daily Kos mobilized our members, who sent high-quality personalized messages to the FCC on net neutrality. A public body receiving 10,000 personalized e-mails about an issue is far more effective than receiving 100,000 standard form letters.

And we will do that again to push for the U.S. Senate to reverse Citizens United.

We are not asking you to click a couple buttons or sign your name, like we usually do.

We need you to take five minutes from your day to write a personal email to one or both of your senators, telling them why you believe we need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and otherwise get money out of our elections.

Will you give us a few minutes of your time and use the space below to write a personal email—in your own words—to your senator about why this issue matters?

In case you are not familiar with what is at stake, here is some background …



Graphic by DonkeyHotey

In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buckley that money is “speech”—which has allowed the rich and powerful to drown out the voices of everyday people in our political system.

Citizens United in 2010 made it even worse, by declaring that corporations are “people” which allowed the Koch Brothers to freely spend their corporate treasuries in political campaigns.

The Supreme Court’s McCutcheon case last year took it a step further by saying that donors had a right to give to an unlimited number of campaigns—from U.S. president to dog catcher.

Please click here and use the form to write and send your personal story and thoughts about why money is not “speech” and corporations are not “people”—and why we must change our constitution. Original emails to your senator are the most effective.