r/politics • u/Hootinger • 16d ago

No Paywall Hakeem Jeffries says Medicare for all is not legislation he currently supports

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/hakeem-jeffries-says-medicare-for-all-is-not-legislation-he-currently-supports-268371525570
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u/DickSlammington 16d ago

Until we repeal citizens united...

Politics in this country is a popularity game for the rich and shameless.

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u/HalJordan2525 16d ago

Would it not take a Constitutional Amendment to repeal Citizens United?

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u/too1onjj 16d ago

No, that was just a Supreme Court decision just like Roe v Wade and can be overturned by the Supreme Court if they determine that it was decided in error or is no longer relevant. Unfortunately, that is definitely not something that's going to happen under this Supreme Court.

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u/Some_Rate3642 16d ago

If you remember, I'm 2009, Associate Judge David Souter wrote a brief that allegedly destroyed the case for Citizens United. But then he "retired" before it was presented, and as is custom with the Supreme Court, anything written by a judge who has retired/died/resigned that hasn't been presented is subject to being withheld for 50 years after he leaves the court. So, basically, the winning argument is our there, but it's been effectively suppressed by the Roberts-led court. Nobody but them knows what's in the brief. And Souter is dead.

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u/rowrbazzle75 16d ago

So many reasons to expand the court. Term limits and lifetime appointments are in the constitution, so harder to fix. But the size of the court is doable.

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u/asomebodyelse 16d ago

Or packing the court.

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u/codered39 16d ago

I’ll never forgive JB for not packing the court.

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u/Land-Southern 16d ago edited 16d ago

It would take one of any of several possible legislation, not an ammendment. State business is not a person. Require donors to publish their names on political contributions. Say money is not considered a form of speech. Outlaw political fundraising.

Lobbying your rep means talking to them, not paying an attorney to sit in an office across the street from the capitol building so they can bend the ear of the senators/reps and invite them to taste an 80 yo scotch in the Cape this weekend while we talk what ifs on pending legislation.

Edit: respondent below is correct. Either pack court to overturn its own precedent or do an ammendment.

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u/MissTetraHyde 16d ago

Actually the theory in Citizens United, which was upheld, was that money used for political purposes is speech and that censoring the usage of it violates the first amendment. An amendment to the Constitution cannot be overruled by a statute. I believe that passing legislation would actually not be sufficient to overcome the holding in Citizens as a result.

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u/RelevantOldOnion 16d ago

Lawyer here. You're generally correct but

Passing legislation can be sufficient to overcome Citizens United. Progressives just need to adopt the Republican playbook and start passing laws that restrict corporation's ability to spend money on campaigns.

It'll get overturned. Then you pass another law crafted in a way that doesn't offend the previous holding. It'll get overturned again. Then you pass another law and rinse and repeat.

As you do that you create a body of caselaw that, by necessity, exposes the architecture of the Citizens United holding, and allows you to craft your law to be compliant with that architecture.

Basically, Democrats need to be doing what Republicans did with Roe.

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u/MissTetraHyde 15d ago edited 11d ago

I would think the difference would come in to the fact that the holding in Roe v. Wade was a lot more of a tenuous one. It was a house of cards in that it, and its progeny Planned Parenthood v. Casey, were a series of holdings about privacy, and about the government's ability to violate privacy, that just happened to apply a certain way to the concept of abortion. It wasn't a ruling which drew a hard line and said "abortion is a protected right under these amendments", but rather it said that "medical privacy is a protected right" and then the application of that holding was to uphold the right against government intrusion into the private medical relationship between patient and doctor vis-a-vis abortions. It just happened that protecting the right to privacy had the same outcome as creating a "right" to abortion, as the government's hands were restricted enough that they couldn't regulate beyond the shield of privacy created in Roe.

The holding in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was, however, an explicit creation of the right to political speech under a particular constitutional amendment. The best Congress could hope for might be legislating the definition of political speech or attempting to constrain the reviewability of such actions about political speech, much as they did with the right of habeas corpus in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Even if a right is protected, if your ability to bring it before a tribunal is removed you won't be able to vindicate that right. Sadly, both of those avenues are likely to be subject to considerable review by the Courts because of the nature of this being a First Amendment holding, and because prior restraint of political speech is supremely disfavored. There would also be substantive due process issues with deliberately seeking to make such laws to thwart a Constitutional right via reviewability, but I digress.

To be clear I think the holding in Roe should have been allowed to remain good law, and I think that the holding in Citizens United is terrible and ought to be stricken. But unfortunately the Justices of the Supreme Court who decided Citizens likely knew precisely what method of holding money as political speech would be most difficult to constrain, and a Constitutional right was their vehicle for ensuring they couldn't be overturned by another branch.

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u/Land-Southern 16d ago

Fair point. Thanks. That does mean packing the court to revist the precedent or an ammendment sadly.

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u/biggersjw 16d ago

Actually no. Corporations are controlled by each State they are incorporated. As such, you can amend how and what a corporation is. The Supreme Court overstepped its authority with Citizens United because corporations are state controlled - not at the federal level. The final legal determination is controlled by each States Supreme Court.

Each State can simply put into the corporate law, the entity is not a person therefore they cannot contribute money or conversely, limit their contribution to the same legal limit an individual can contribute to a politician.

While this doesn’t do away with PAC’s, it would severely limit the contribution amount of money flowing into PAC’s. Since most PAC’s are LLC’s or some form of a corporation, they too fall within the scope of State corporate law.

There are articles/videos about this particular issue and how to get around Citizens United and go deeper into the legal process.

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u/az_catz 16d ago

No, it would take a normal law passed through the House and the Senate, then signed by the President. The problem is it would need to clear the filibuster in the Senate, which is nearly impossible.

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u/Citrakayah 16d ago

No, it would take a constitutional amendment. Congress cannot simply overturn Supreme Court rulings. They need to either pass a constitutional amendment or write a new law that accomplishes the same effect through different means that the Court won't say are unconstitutional. You will note many of the bills produced in Congress to overturn Citizens United are proposed constitutional amendments, not normal laws.

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u/az_catz 16d ago

Damn, it looks like you are right.

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u/joeshmo101 16d ago

What it would really take is for legislation to pass that says "Corporations are not people" because that was the justification behind Citizens United.

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u/DickSlammington 16d ago

Yup basically.

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u/az_catz 16d ago

No, it would only need to be codified and enacted into law with the biggest hurdle being the Senate filibuster.

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u/portagenaybur 16d ago

Which won’t be in my generation unfortunately.

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u/DickSlammington 16d ago

Certainly not mine either...

I'm watching a lot of my friends who were fairly liberal turn more conservative as we get to our 40s.

I have friends that don't own a home, are still struggling financially.. and honestly thought Trump was a better option even though Harris was proposing things like huge credits for first time home buyers...

It's like Americans don't want succeed..

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u/SalandaBlanda Maryland 16d ago

Because people still think all they have to do is work hard and they'll be millionaires. Its just a current struggle and eventually they'll win big!

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u/nobodysfool24 16d ago

This country was built on racism… “Melting Pot” is coded cheap labor…

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u/nobodysfool24 16d ago

The point of my comment being in response to “Americans don’t want to succeed”, is that it’s not that they don’t want to succeed they just can’t risk having less desirables succeed also…

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u/Stuck_in_Arizona 16d ago

I think it's so much this.

At huge risk of sounding like a certain group of people, growing up I've known people even ones I used to call friends would look down at me or tell me where "my place" should be.

When I work harder than them and find success, they'll get jealous and try to rationalize I didn't earn it. My place to them is at the bottom of the ladder no matter where I work.

While they cry about "DEI" they inherit everything from their parents and grandparents yet complain when others have the same things they'll assume it's ill-gotten. They don't see their own privilege, they think they earned it because they won the social lottery.

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u/GEO147064 16d ago

Damn shame, glad they aren't your "friends" anymore.

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u/burlap_underground 16d ago

Was about to say the same. Propaganda is heavy on this everywhere.

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u/Delta-9- 16d ago

The conservative propaganda machine may the most effective large-scale social engineering effort in history. Even the CCP and other propaganda-driven regimes had to resort to overt and explicit state violence to get their citizenry aligned.

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u/KarunchyTakoa 16d ago

Seems to be preying on/leveraging humanity's natural greed. The more immature or ignorant a person the more likely it is to work on them. Unfortunately very effective.

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u/onlyoneq 16d ago

Not with that attitude

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u/iprobablybrokeit 16d ago

We all thought that about Roe too. Until we didn't.

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u/Schonke 16d ago

Snyder v. United States is even more important to repeal if you want to get rid of people seeking political office for money and power...

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u/thatcommiegamer 16d ago

This might be unpopular here in liberal Reddit Mecca but if you have the political will to do all that you might as well just remake the whole constitution.

There is no universe in which our ruling class willingly gives up power. Things are likely to get bloodier before they get better. We can never get the New Deal coalition back together, a coalition that only existed because of how powerful the threat of communist revolution is. The working class has been on the back foot since the 70s (and even then, the New Deal only really applied to white members of the working class).

China, for all the good it does, is not the USSR and cannot be that ideological challenger to US hegemony that forces the ruling class to give us concessions. We needed to organize 2 decades ago, but now is the best time we have.

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u/VariationBusiness603 16d ago

You are entirely correct, of course. I am not american myself, but it's not all that different here. People still believe that democracy means putting a paper in a box to chose between 2 people pre-approved by the capital that exploits us. And nothing else.

You people will likely have to wait for the mid-term and watch the most obvious display of ratfuckery ever and hope that's enouth for the people to drop the ridiculous "let's vote the entrenched fascists out" nonsense. And finally start organizing.

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u/thatcommiegamer 14d ago

You people will likely have to wait for the mid-term and watch the most obvious display of ratfuckery ever and hope that's enouth for the people to drop the ridiculous "let's vote the entrenched fascists out" nonsense. And finally start organizing.

I've been politically active since Bush and idk. We seem to just be making more liberals but these ones put on lip service to socialism. Americans just want their treats and, to be real, as long as those treats are built off the bodies of the poor and working class world wide? We don't deserve them.

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u/PropofolMargarita 16d ago

I am not american myself

Lmao. Every. Damn. Time.

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u/Ok-Ad-2050 16d ago

That's a good first step.

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u/Korashy 16d ago

Before citizen united they just served one master, who gave them the golden consultant parachute for when they retire.

They nice thing about that was they did need to retire though to actually make all the money privately before they died.

Citizens United is why you see so many octogenarian politicians clinging to power.

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u/NoHorseNoMustache 15d ago

There was a big problem with lobbying money in politics before CU became a thing. Totally removing private donations to campaigns at a national level is necessary before we can fix this.

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u/Creditfigaro 16d ago

What makes you think that will ever happen with demons like Jeffries and Schumer in office?