Authoritarian Senate Republicans deal a massive blow to defense of democracy

The Washington Post writes:

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked legislation that would have required super PACs and other groups to disclose donors who give $10,000 or more during an election cycle, a blow to Democrats’ efforts to reform campaign financing laws.

In a procedural vote Thursday morning, the Senate failed to advance the Disclose Act on a 49-49 vote along party lines. No Republicans voted for it. At least 60 votes would have been required for the Senate to end debate on the bill and advance it.

Spending in election cycles by corporations and the ultrawealthy through so-called dark money groups has skyrocketed since the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed incorporated entities and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to promote or attack candidates. Democrats have railed unsuccessfully against the ruling for more than a decade, saying the ability for corporations and billionaires to advocate for or against candidates anonymously through such groups has given them outsize influence in American politics. Republicans have defended the right of corporations to make political donations, even as some of them have called for greater transparency in campaign financing.

Before the vote Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted that, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United, the dissenting justices had warned that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”

“Sadly, they turned out to be right,” Schumer said. “By giving massive corporations the same rights as individual citizens, multibillionaires being able to have their voice … drowning out the views of citizens, and by casting aside decades of campaign finance law and by paving the way for powerful elites to pump nearly endless cash, Citizens United has disfigured our democracy almost beyond recognition.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized the bill as “an insult to the First Amendment” and encouraged Republicans to vote against it Thursday.

“Today’s liberal pet priority is a piece of legislation designed to give unelected federal bureaucrats vastly more power over private citizens’ First Amendment rights and political activism, and to strip privacy away from Americans who speak out about politics in their private lives,” McConnell said before the vote.

The only insult here is McConnell’s and the Republican Party’s cynical lie that the defense of democracy bill is liberal, a bureaucratic power grab or a serious assault on free speech or privacy rights. Republicans lies are so blatant and shameless now. That there is little or no public moral outrage is evidence that the Republican Party, driven by well-funded but anonymous forces of autocracy, Christian Taliban theocracy, kleptocracy and brass knuckles capitalism, are on the verge of winning it all.

When they win power and wealth, we will lose our power, wealth, protection by the rule of law, our civil liberties and all hope of protecting the environment. Those are the stakes. That is not an exaggeration.