To the Editor:

On Tuesday, I joined over 100 Mainers at the State House. We and many others around the state urge the 126th Legislature to declare its support for an amendment to the United State Constitution that would undo Citizens United — that is, it would empower state governments to regulate the raising and spending of funds in elections.

If the Maine Legislature sees fit, it would be the 12th in the nation to do so.

In the Citizens United decision, five justices of the Supreme Court — sorcerer apprentices of sorts — have turned the often useful human construct, the corporation, into a monster that poisons our political life.

It is the Supreme Court that usurped the 2000 presidential election and underwrites shameful guns laws, but is it not absurd that “money equals free speech” and that corporations have the same rights as humans?

I don’t know which notion is more ludicrous: The more money you have the more free speech? And if corporations are individuals in the eye of the law, should they not be allowed to marry?

A recent New Yorker cartoon has one Founding Father asking another in reference to the newly minted Constitution, “Do you think they’ll see the irony in this?” Irony is expressing something different, and usually the opposite, than what the words literally mean. The sense of humor of our five reactionary judges falls flat with me.

Inequality has been rising in this country for 30 years. I suppose the wealthy have always and will always have more power. But should our Constitution aide and abet? If the nine justices are the umpires, and if a strike is whatever the umpire says it is, then yes, the Constitution says the wealthy should have more power.

That is why we need a constitutional amendment. And if the United States Congress can’t get its act together, then Move To Amend, the national group working to bring sanity to politics, will move for a Constitutional Convention.

Dick Seymour
Brunswick