The Citizens United president: Column It will soon be too late for Barack Obama to correct the ruling that unleashed dark money into the election cycle.

Robert Weissman | USA TODAY

Will Barack Obama be remembered for standing by helplessly as Citizens United eroded the very foundations of our electoral democracy?

That may be an unfortunate part of his legacy if he fails to take action soon to do something — anything — about the billions of dollars in corporate and super-rich money flooding over the electoral terrain.

There’s no doubt that President Obama opposes Citizens United and its underlying logic. Before he was elected president, he wrote in Audacity of Hope about how consorting with rich donors affected even his own worldview, taking him away from the concerns of ordinary Americans. As a candidate, he campaigned on fixing the public financing system for presidential candidates and money-in-politics reform more generally, even calling money “the original sin in politics.” As president, he famously denounced in his 2010 State of the Union address the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision just days after it was issued. He has called for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and called in his most recent State of the Union for “a better politics” free of "dark money."

But there’s also this fact: Citizens United was decided with President Obama in the White House. In the almost six years since then, he has made almost no effort to address the political disaster unleashed by Citizens United. And, while he’s been president, the federal policy response to Citizens United has been to do — exactly nothing.

In 2010, the Disclose Act, a far-reaching disclosure bill, passed the House of Representatives but was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Since then, there’s been no serious legislative movement on any campaign spending reform.

Meanwhile, the executive branch and independent agencies have matched the Congress inaction for inaction.

At the Federal Election Commission, where President Obama to his credit has appointed quite good commissioners, partisan gridlock has created what is widely hailed as one of the most dysfunctional agencies in Washington.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, no action to require publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending.

At the Federal Communication Commission, no action to require disclosure of donors to groups that broadcast issue ads.

At the Internal Revenue Service, no action — though at least the Commissioner is proposing action sometime in the future — to clarify the rules about what counts as electioneering by nonprofits and trade associations.

The case for action, any action, is overwhelming. A tiny number of super-rich donors and corporations are dominating our elections, influencing who runs, who wins, what is debated and what elected officials do.Negative attack ads fill the airwaves, making a mockery of democratic debate.The incredibly modest campaign spending rules still in place are often ignored.Unaccountable outside groups are sometimes spending more in close elections than candidates themselves. And secret money is washing over the entire system, undermining any pretense of democratic accountability and transparency.

The American people get it. How could they not? They are subjected to the insufferable ads. They see who runs for office, what they say and what they do. And every day affords new evidence that the system is rigged. As a result, Americans support fundamental reform — up to and including a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United — by overwhelming margins.

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President Obama has 13 months left in office, and just over a month before we begin the calendar election year. There is very little time left for the president to take any action to repair even a small bit of the damage created by Citizens United.

There is one important thing he can do with a stroke of a pen, however: President Obama can issue an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose their political spending expenditures. Such action would help prevent contractors from leveraging secret campaign spending to win federal contracts. It would also shine a light on the dark money spending by federal contractors, a group that includes most large corporations.

A dark money executive order would make our government perform better, eliminate secret election spending by most large corporations and show the American people that it is, in fact, possible to do something about the undue influence of big money over our politics and government.

And, it would save Barack Obama from being remembered, at least in part, as the president who stood on the sidelines and failed to act as corporations and the donor class displaced We the People, and captured control of our elections.

Robert Weissman is the president of Public Citizen.

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