People Before Citizens United

I spent 40 years of my life as an educator. I am proud of the fact that my life was devoted to working with parents to care for and educate their children. The children did not have a bright blue D or a shiny red R inscribed on their foreheads. The schools I taught at were not Blue schools or Red schools. Politics was a topic of learning included as part of a civics class or a social studies class. Politicians were very far removed from the classroom. No more, however. Politics and politicians now are integral parts of virtually every aspect of education – what schools a child can attend, what resources are available to teachers for use in the classroom and, most recently, and somewhat frighteningly, how secure our schools are and how safe our children will be.

That brings me to something that I find increasingly worrisome. When teaching a civics class or a social studies class, I always taught that in the United States there are three branches of government – the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch. Each of these branches has specific separate, but related and interdependent roles and powers. A system of checks and balances exists to protect the electorate – those citizens who have the right and responsibility to elect from their peers the individuals who will govern our nation. I always believed that this system of checks and balances would safeguard the electorate from individuals and groups who might seek to manipulate our government and veer away from another fundamental democratic principle – that our government is “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

So we have been teaching our children that there are three branches of government and that it is the voters, the individual citizens, who have (or should have) the power to elect those who will lead our cities, states and nation. It is becoming frighteningly clear, however, that we have, in recent years, misled the young people we have been teaching. We have neglected to expose the fact that no branch of our government, nor the combined branches of government, seems strong enough to resist or combat the overwhelming and devastating power of money in our electoral process. Politicians, be they wealthy or not, are confronted with what appears to be the fourth branch of government, otherwise known as the Citizens United Branch.

There are other names under which the Citizens United Branch of government operates. For some it is the NRA. For others it might be the Koch Brothers. For still others it may be powerful unions (to be fair, the Citizens United Branch is an equal opportunity money source.) Whatever the source, the ultimate result is a total destruction of the primary goal of an elected, representative government – one person, one vote. This is an alarming state of affairs. Our rights as citizens can only be protected by a constitution and a government that recognizes that the rights of each and every citizen supercede greed and political self-interest.

Our government must recognize that the rights of the people cannot be replaced by the power of money. The Citizens United Branch of government must be eliminated and it must happen soon. The good that government does seems so easily and quickly lost. The injustice seems almost impossible to overturn.