Obama's eloquence and the "Citizens United" decision

I get why some Democrats are enthusiastic about seeing Barack Obama give an eloquent campaign speech for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe on Saturday. And I certainly hope McAuliffe wins that election.

His speech in this video from The Independent starts at 1:32:00, Live: Obama campaigns with Virginia gubernatorial candidate McAuliffe 10/23/2021:

I'm sure the speech will be quoted and celebrated on the Sunday talk shows.

But it came off to me as a nostalgia act. He's a great speaker, and he invoked the hits of yesteryear. And, thank God, he didn't talk about the need for a new Simpson-Bowles Let-Grandma-Eat-Catfood Commission to promote cuts in Social Security and Medicare ("entitlements"). Not all oldies were hits.

He did talk about the importance of protecting voter rights, and good for him that he did. But we should also recall another eloquent speech of his during his first term after the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United decision in January 2010 that laid waste much of the campaign-finance regulations.

It was actually one of his best speeches, Weekly Address: Fighting for the Public Against Special Interests 01/23/2010:

From the text:

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

Citizens United is still in effect. Obama and the Democrats did make an effort that year to pass legislation called the DISCLOSE Act that would institute disclosure requirements to remedy some of the harm of the Citizens United decision. Senate Republicans killed it with a filibuster. Here is a brief history from Wikipedia:

The DISCLOSE Act passed the House of Representatives in June 2010 on a 219–206 vote, but was defeated in the Senate following a successful Republican filibuster; after cloture motions in July 2010 and September 2010 resulted in 57–41 and 59–39 votes, respectively, failing to obtain the necessary 60 votes to advance. Senate and House Democrats, such as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, have re-introduced variants of the DISCLOSE Act to each succeeding Congress since 2010. An unsuccessful 2014 version of the bill was sponsored by 50 Senate Democrats.

In 2019, the DISCLOSE Act requirements were incorporated into the broader For the People Act (H.R. 1), which passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on a party-line 234–193 vote, but did not advance in the then Republican-controlled Senate.

The Democrats had a 59-vote majority in the Senate in mid-2010. Fifty of those Democratic Senators plus Joe Biden as Vice President and presiding officer of the Senate could have changed the filibuster rule and passed that law. The same dilemma the voting-rights legislation faces right now.

Although Obama said of Citizens United, "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest," in practice he and the 59-41 Democratic majority in the Senate considered the Senate filibuster rule more important to retain than it was to remedy what declared to be the most devasting thing for the public interest at that moment.

After that, Citizens United became one more item on the Democratic list to use for fundraising letters.

But Obama's January 23, 2010 speech on the topic was eloquent. So there's that.