At a press briefing on Wednesday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) spoke about his bill to ban Super PACs from federal elections.
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00:00I'm now honored to introduce Congressman Ro Khanna, who is also spearheading this important piece of legislation.
00:07Well, thank you, Alexandra. Thank you, Representative Summerlee, for your leadership, for being a voice of the grassroots and people instead of special interests.
00:25You've always shown courage in standing up for people and grassroots causes.
00:32And thank you to Larry Lessig. I was a research assistant for him once, a long time ago.
00:38He's been sounding the alarm on the money in politics for almost 20 years.
00:45And, Larry, it keeps getting worse. I don't know how effective you've been, but you've been sounding the alarm.
00:51At some point, people are going to realize how corrupt the system has become.
01:00We have an unholy alliance in this country between wealth and power.
01:07We fought a revolution in America so that people would have a say in self-governance,
01:13not so they could be passive bystanders watching billionaires fund television and digital ads and having little say in outcomes.
01:28Obviously, it's been most abused in the past election by Musk and by super PACs that are now threatening members of Congress and senators if they vote the wrong way.
01:41But being honest, it's being abused by all parties on both sides.
01:46I mean, you have billionaires that funded the Harris campaign with super PACs.
01:51You have billionaires that funded the Trump campaign. It has to end.
01:54And what Representative Summer Lee is proposing is common sense, because it passed, as Larry will go into, I'm sure, in more detail in May.
02:03It passed with Republican support. It passed with independent support and Democratic support.
02:09All it's saying is you shouldn't be able to give a super PAC more money than you give a candidate in a simple sentence.
02:16I mean, why is it that someone who's a billionaire is restricted in contributing to me?
02:23They can't contribute more than $7,000 in an election cycle to me.
02:28And yet they can go spend millions of dollars on a super PAC.
02:32It makes no sense. The Supreme Court, even this Supreme Court, has held that contribution limits to candidates are constitutional, even under Citizens United.
02:42Well, there's no reason if contributions to candidates are constitutional, contribution limits to candidates are constitutional, that you shouldn't have contribution limits be constitutional for the Supreme Court.
02:54And Maine passed it. And what Summer Lee is trying to do is make sure that what Maine passed with 70 percent becomes federal law.
03:01So that if you want to have a super PAC for $7,000, you can.
03:05But what you can't do is have multi, multi millions of dollars in these super PACs taking away agency from citizens.
03:13There should be a whole group of Republicans here.
03:17They should be here more than anyone because they're the ones who are facing the biggest threats of these super PACs.
03:22And it really I don't view this as a partisan issue.
03:26I view this as an issue of restoring the heartbeat of democracy, of restoring a democracy where you have to actually go be in town halls, earn people's votes by knocking on doors and talking to people, not just by relying on a couple of very, very wealthy people to to to run elections.
03:52Let me end with this point.
03:55I think that the country at this moment is very similar to where we were in the 1920s.
04:02They called them the Roaring 20s.
04:05There was at the time a lot of technology advance, the automobile, radio, television.
04:11And there was a view amongst the entrepreneurial business class.
04:15And that view was embodied by Andrew Mellon, who was the Treasury Secretary.
04:20He was sort of the, quote unquote, billionaire of his time who had come into government.
04:25And what Mellon believed is that the country's progress was being led by business leaders and technology leaders.
04:34And ordinary Americans sort of were unworthy.
04:37He actually called them incompetent.
04:39And he said that they were on the public dole.
04:43They shouldn't really have a place.
04:45Just give the power to the technology and business leaders.
04:49Liquidate, he said, government, liquidate labor, liquidate stocks.
04:53And Herbert Hoover listened to him.
04:55And he did exactly that.
04:57And then they learned their lesson.
04:58We had a Great Depression.
05:00And the lesson that we learned was that actually what builds the American economy, what builds our country are ordinary, hardworking Americans.
05:08Well, we learned that lesson up till about now.
05:11And now they're trying to unlearn that lesson and go back to the 1920s.
05:15Same attitude, different generation.
05:18They think they're original, but it's the same story in history.
05:20They think they know better than ordinary Americans.
05:23And they're making the same mistakes.
05:25That's why consumer confidence is down.
05:27Inflation is up.
05:28Because we know in this country that it's ordinary Americans who build the nation.
05:33And what this bill does is it restores power to those ordinary Americans.
05:37So thank you, Summer, for working on it.
05:39I hope we can get a wide bipartisan group of our colleagues on this bill.