Michael Kazin: A Constitutional Amendment to Fix Campaign Finance Can’t Pass Congress. But It Could Start a Movement.

Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown University.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, nearly everybody (everybody except conservative ideologues, of course) complains about rich people and big corporations bankrolling our campaigns, but hardly anybody seems to be doing anything about it. However, that has finally started to change: Recently, several Democratic lawmakers have introduced constitutional amendments that would overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United and give Congress and the states the power to prohibit or severely limit corporate donations in the future.

The proposed amendments aim to achieve those goals in different ways. That sponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Mark Begich (D-AK) would ban any spending by “corporate and private entities” on candidates and ballot measures. In contrast, the language in the amendment Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced in the House this week, drafted by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, avoids targeting corporations by name: It states instead that the Constitution does not prevent Congress or the states “from imposing content-neutral limitations” on “private” or “independent” contributions to campaigns. But both bills express the same passionate yearning to drive the big money out of our elections—for good....