Washington, DC - Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger offered the following testimony before Congress on the Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens United:

Corporate executives are on a roll, and the rest of us are paying a steep price. The most recent case in point is the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, which has overturned a century of federal law, and the law in half of the states, and given the green light to unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns. What this means is that corporate CEOs are now free to raid the corporate till at will and spend their shareholders' money to advance a personal and corporate political agenda which has seen multi-million dollar bonuses for the select few, and continued unemployment, inadequate health care, and a host of other socials ills for everyone else. Congress needs to act quickly to mitigate the harm caused by this decision.

The rules thrown out by the Supreme Court were hardly perfect, but they at least attempted to impose some accountability on the system. My own union provides a good example of how the rules were working. SEIU's 2.2 million members do not include corporate CEOs or bankers. Our members are nurses, janitors, government employees
and other service employees. They want their voices heard, and they understand that the only way that is going to happen is if they act as a group. That is why SEIU, like most other unions, created what the law calls a Separate Segregated Fund, or a Political Action Committee, which allows our members voluntarily to contribute to an account for the specific purpose of engaging in politics. Let me stress: our independent expenditures are funded by voluntary contributions knowingly contributed to advance our members' political goals, and by law we solicit only our own members and administrative personnel to participate in the Fund.

Moreover, regulations require that we fully disclose to our contributors and the general public how we spend these voluntary contributions, and SEIU's PAC is proud to identify itself as the sponsor of its ads. The Supreme Court majority mocks these regulations as
typical burdensome government regulations, but in the end of the day what they required is that people and groups report how they are spending their money.

Compare that to what corporations can do after Citizens United. Our member who voluntarily contributes $5 out of her paycheck to SEIU's political action committee may also direct another $5 to her 401K account for her retirement. Most of that money ends up in publicly traded stocks, which is to say it is indirectly funding publicly-traded corporations. When a CEO then chooses to make an independent political expenditure, he is using that $5 or contributions like it. The difference between this contribution and the union member's voluntary PAC contribution could not be more stark: Unlike the union member, the stockholder has no interest in funding this political speech. Indeed, the stockholder has no way of even knowing she is funding this political speech. The corporation has no obligation to report to its shareholders that it intends to, or has, made this expenditure. Instead, massive amounts of money are collected by corporations for reasons wholly unrelated to the shareholders' political preferences, and then dumped into the political process with no accountability whatsoever.

This is not about citizens being able to act collectively, even through corporations. Shareholders already had the right to engage in politics through the corporations in which they own shares. Just like union members voluntarily contribute to union PACs, corporate shareholders contribute to corporate PACS. Indeed, during the last election cycle, corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars through their PACs - more than unions were able to spend.

But the five activist judges on the Supreme Court evidently decided that the playing field needs to be substantially more tilted in favor of big money. Now corporations don't have to ask their shareholders to contribute to electoral politics. They can just take as much of their money as they want, without seeking their shareholders' permission, and without even telling their shareholders what they are doing. And that includes money from foreign shareholders that had no right to contribute to electoral politics under the law that was overturned by the Court. That's Citizens United.

The only fully adequate solution is to have it made clear that the First Amendment was never intended to give corporations the same free speech rights as living, breathing citizens. But we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

There are important steps that the Congress can and should take immediately to minimize the damage caused by Citizens United. We have proposed legislation to toughen up disclosure rules, so that corporate shareholders, and the public at large, know the details about how CEOs are raiding the corporate till to advance their personal political preferences. Better disclaimer rules, so that when corporations set up front groups to hide their true identity with anodyne names like Citizens United," the public knows where the money supporting the ads is really coming from. And since the Court has said that shareholder democracy can assure that corporate money is not spent heedlessly, let's require those corporations that choose to spend their shareholders' money on politics to adopt some democratic practices. Shareholders shouldn't have to support the political preferences of CEOs of companies in which they own stock, when they have no practical ability to stop that corporate spending.

Corporations should not be the only "people" to have First Amendment rights. Congress should give shareholders a right to object to the funding of electoral politics through their stock ownership, and give them a refund to account for a corporation's political expenditures made over their objection. Finally, SEIU has long supported public financing of elections. These limited measures by themselves won't stop corporate money from overwhelming our political system. But they will at least restore some fairness to the political process after Citizens United.

We appreciate the opportunity to share our views with the Committee.

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