Throughout January, I spent my Saturday mornings at the town dump in 10-degree weather and many weekday evenings in an overheated gym watching the 8th grade girls’ basketball team—all as part of my job.
Along with organizers in 65 other Vermont towns, I was collecting signatures on a petition to the local selectboard (town council) in support of a populist rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ludicrous assertion that money is speech.
On Thursday, those cold mornings and hot evenings paid off. The Vermont House of Representatives agreed overwhelmingly to a resolution already approved by the state Senate and calling on Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. The two-year old ruling allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to elect or defeat public officials.
The House victory, by a vote of 92-40, came after two hours of debate. In passing the resolution, Vermont becomes the third state after New Mexico and Hawaii, to request that Congress pass the amendment.
Each chamber debated the measure for two hours, and time and again proponents bolstered their legal arguments with the fact that voters had approved it, usually by large majorities, in 64 of the 65 towns where it was on the Town Meeting agenda. Opponents tried to diminish that argument by noting that the wording of the resolution varied (slightly) or was modified among the different town meetings.
But most legislators appeared to regard such arguments as distinctions without a difference. Indeed, many argued the problem was not just with unlimited independent expenditures but also with the growing role of money in politics in general, and the specific failure of our legislature to adopt meaningful campaign finance reforms.
This uprising against corporate domination of our elections crosses ideological boundaries. I live in a very conservative town, but I found that if I could get people to stand still in the chill to hear me out, they would at the chance to sign my petition. I got comebacks like, “You bet I’ll sign that,” and “By Jeezum, I’ll sign.” For every one who declined, I got 15 signatures.
After the vote at our town meeting — a loud chorus of “Yays” against two weak and lonely “Nays,” — the town’s leading liberal activist came up to congratulate me. “In all my years here, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
This is how we begin to restore our democracy, at the grassroots, even if in Vermont in January the grass roots are frozen.