29 March 2016
The email, not spam, asked: “Will you go to jail?”
As intended, that question, from the Bold Progressives, got my attention. The Bold Progressives and upwards of a hundred allies will engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in early April to underscore just how fed up they are with Citizens United campaign finance decision that’s billionaires buy elections. The email invited me to join the festivities:
Six years ago, the Supreme Court undermined our democracy with Citizens United. In 2013, they did it again by gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Deaf to the pleas of millions, Congress has failed to right these wrongs. Now, we must act.
This April, we and over a hundred progressive allies will mobilize by the thousands in Washington DC and around the nation. We’ll demand a democracy where all can be heard and all get to vote.
And we won’t leave until our demands are met or they take us to jail in handcuffs.
Click here to join the fight for our democracy. (Risking arrest is optional.)
We won’t be alone. Thousands of people from over a coalition of over hundred organizations will come together in April to raise our voices as one. Organizations such as 99 Rise, who made history videotaping their protest inside the Supreme Court on the anniversary of Citizens United. (You may remember seeing the video on MSNBC.)
The action will begin on April 2nd with a 140-mile march from Philadelphia to Washington DC and a demand that Congress take immediate action to end the corruption of our democracy.
From April 11-16, PCCC co-founders Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor will join dozens of public figures and thousands of others who will risk arrest in one of the largest nonviolent civil disobedience actions in a generation. They’ll be supported by thousands more who will participate in legal protests without risking arrest.
Two weeks of escalating protest and media attention will culminate in a massive weekend of action April 16-18 with teach-ins, concerts, grassroots lobbying, a huge rally in Washington DC, and solidarity events in cities across the nation.
This will be like the Keystone tar sands action in 2014 — shifting the national debate as never before to the urgency of this crisis,the proposals that exist to solve it, and the overwhelming popular demand to enact them.
Will I join them? No. There are only two ways of undoing Citizens United. One is persuading a liberalized Supreme Court to reverse the decision. The other is passing an amendment that hardwires campaign finance limits into the constitution.
If Democrats hold the White House and seize control of Congress, and the next justice to retire or drop dead is a conservative, the change in the court’s personnel could make a reversal possible. A constitutional amendment is possible, but the odds of getting it through 38 state legislatures are lottery level at this point.
Marching and getting arrested makes no sense to me. Classic nonviolent civil disobedience involves breaking an unjust law in the hope that being prosecuted for breaking it will result in the law’s being declared unconstitutional by a court, or repealed by a legislature. That was the principle at the heart of the sit-ins of the civil rights movement, and of Ghandi’s salt march. It requires conviction and courage.
But that’s not what the Bold Progressives, et al, are planning. No, they’re planning to raise a ruckus to call attention to the consequences of Citizens United. They’re out to offend peace and quiet, to disrupt the daily lives of people who may agree that the Citizens United decision is wrong, even evil, but who value domestic tranquility. Some, frankly, are so frustrated with Citizens United that they just have to do something besides make speeches and write letters to the editor. Yet others are hoodlums at heart who get thrills, and a sense of moral superiority, from what they call direct action.
We are thus condemned to a repeat of the tactics of the sixties. Those tactics led to Richard Nixon’s election. I hope next week’s disruptions do not lead to the election of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.