Council Backs Caps on Corporate 'Speech'

Santa Monica is now one of dozens of cities across the country calling on Congress to reverse the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which extends to corporations the right to spend unlimited sums in elections.

In a unanimous vote Tuesday night, the City Council adopted a resolution "to safeguard free and fair elections in our democratic process." It calls for limits on corporate donations to political campaigns and says the city rejects the notion that corporations must be treated the same as people with regard to corporate participation in political campaigns.

"We ought to encourage federal legislators to take whatever means necessary to overturn Citizens United and to limit corporate contributions," said Councilwoman Gleam Davis.

In the resolution, city leaders say they want increased public awareness about the "risks" of "unfettered campaign spending by private and special interest entities that are neither natural persons nor voters." In part, the resolution reads:

In the last fifty years, there have been mounting concerns about the influence of money upon the electoral process... these concerns include that the candidate who raises the most money will be best situated to influence upon voters and therefore be elected independent of his or her ability to govern and that a candidate funded mainly by private interests will take office beholden to them and may consequently use his or her office to promote those private interests rather than the public welfare.

City Attorney Marsha Jones Moutrie called the resolution a "statement to the world."

Among those pushing for the resolution's passage was Sunset Park resident Cris Gutierrez. She called it "narrow but decent," suggesting she would have preferred a more sweeping resolution that admonished "corporate personhood" altogether.

"We have inherent rights as human beings; corporations have assigned rights," she told the council.

But Councilwoman Davis said that First Amendment rights extended to corporations, especially in the case of nonprofits and small businesses, have sometimes been beneficial. She referred to the 1963 Supreme Court ruling in NAACP v. Button, which protected the group from a Virginia statute that would have required race-based groups to file annual financial reports and membership lists with the state.

"In that particular instance, if the NAACP had not been considered a ‘person,' it would not have had inherent right to privacy," Davis said.

At her request, the council eliminated from the resolution a line that said it supported Move to Amend, a popular grass-roots group seeking to strip constitutional rights from all corporations.

“The nub of the issue, as I see it, is we do not want people or corporations with large amounts of money to be able to spend that money in an unlimited way and have an undue influence on elections," she said.

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