Our campaign finance system is now so compromised by the unregulated infusion of big money that the core of our democracy is at risk. The idea that our public officials would be elected through a process open to and equal for all -- without undue manipulation by the rich and powerful – goes back to the country’s founding. James Madison emphasized it in the Federalist Papers:

Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscure and unpropitious fortune. The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States.





But our broken system and pay-to-play culture in Washington has allowed wealthy individuals and moneyed interests to increasingly control our elections, drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens. The vast majority of campaign money now comes from a tiny and privileged segment of our society: less than 1 percent of the population contributes more than 80 percent of all money in federal elections.

This dangerous state of affairs is a product of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have, over time, improvidently opened the flood gates to unbridled expenditures of money in our elections. The problem began in 1976 with the court’s ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, equating money with speech and setting us on a course where elections could resemble auctions, purchasable by the highest bidders. In the ensuing years, the problem of unlimited campaign spending worsened. Then, in 2010, the court decided Citizens United v. FEC, which included the misguided holding that corporations were “people” and which unleashed unlimited dollars into our political process from corporations and billionaires.

By allowing the unregulated infusion of money into the political process, the system permits a privileged few to exert undue influence over what should be a level playing field. The vast majority of ordinary citizens sit on the sidelines while the rich and powerful dump huge amounts of money into this country’s elections, distorting them to their own advantage.

This crisis in our democracy is only exacerbated by income inequality levels which are now at the highest point since the Great Depression. And, there can be no question that it disproportionately impacts communities of color, which see the worst levels of such inequality and which are also victimized by a range of other barriers to our democracy, including discriminatory redistricting and new photo identification requirements in order to vote.

But there is a remedy. Article V to the U.S. Constitution provides us the power to enact a 28th Amendment that would end big money dominance of our elections and level the playing field for all, regardless of economic status. The amendment would overturn the court’s rulings in Citizens United and Buckley and would allow for overall spending limits in our elections.

In the four years since the Citizens United ruling, a growing movement has emerged demanding this amendment – the Democracy For All Amendment – and last month it received the support of 54 U.S. senators in an historic vote.

Those who contend such an amendment is quixotic are wrong. Every civil rights gain in our history has been won in the face of skepticism or hostility. In fact, we have used this constitutional amendment power before to bring down barriers to our democracy and to overturn wrong-headed Supreme Court rulings which threaten our republic. The most relevant example for our time is the history of the poll tax, a fee charged to voters for decades throughout the Deep South, disproportionately blocking African-American citizens from exercising the franchise. In 1937 and in 1951, poor voters challenged the poll tax as a violation of the Constitution on equal protection grounds. In both cases, the Supreme Court found constitutional justification for requiring citizens to pay a fee in order to vote.

Then, in 1964, in the heat of the Civil Rights movement, the nation enacted the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, forever banning poll taxes in federal elections. Two years later, the Supreme Court finally got it right, issuing a ruling striking down, on equal protection grounds, the poll tax for Virginia’s state elections.

If the promise of political equality is to mean anything, it must, first and foremost, have meaning for the masses, including the most powerless of our society. In a true political democracy, the poor and the rich are on equal footing.

More than 150 years after the Federalists Papers were inked, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and spoke about a “promissory note” that had “come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” It is a promissory note still unfulfilled.