Letter: Lovely, Tucker Work to Overturn Citizens United

SALEM, MA – This is a letter to the editor sent by a community member.

Thanks to State Sen. Joan Lovely and State Rep. Paul Tucker for co-sponsoring the We the People Act which will hopefully be passed in the new legislative session. The bill calls for a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United v. FEC that opened the floodgates to the corrupting influence of money in our political system, and other decisions that have given HUMAN rights to corporations.

Our government now serves special interests rather than We the People, and these special interests use their human constitutional rights to avoid compliance with laws made to protect the health and safety of the people and our planet. Our democracy is steadily losing strength. A January article in the Economist said: “America, which has long defined itself as a standard-bearer of democracy for the world, has become a “flawed democracy” according to the taxonomy used in the annual Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company. Although its score did not fall by much…it was enough for it to slip just below the 8.00 threshold for a "full democracy."

We must fight back, by getting Congress to send an amendment to the states for ratification. The amendment will assure that political contributions can be limited, and that constitutional rights apply only to living human beings. To accomplish that, we must support state legislators like Joan Lovely and Paul Tucker, and speak to others about supporting it.

Many thanks to them for their work on this bill.

– Kathy Lique, We the People MA/North Shore