For Immediate Release
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Contact: Adam Bozzi, [email protected]
Campaign finance reform group End Citizens United is calling on Senator Kelly Ayotte to drop her opposition to a series of reforms that would limit the outsized influence that a handful of billionaires and corporate special interests have over our elections and government. They are urging her to instead stand with New Hampshire families, who know the system has been rigged against them.
“Senator Ayotte’s preferred Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, may support giving millionaires and billionaires more influence over issues that impact all of us, but New Hampshirites want reform,” Tiffany Muller, End Citizens United Executive Director, said. “It’s bad enough she’s voting against the well-being of middle class families and in favor of the corporate special interests funding her campaign. But her opposition to popular, common-sense reforms like spending caps and transparency is making it even more difficult for the rest of us to have our voices heard. Getting Senator Ayotte to side with New Hampshire families shouldn’t be this hard.”
Senator Ayotte, who has taken over $585,000 from the insurance industry, has voted to end Medicare as we know it by replacing it with a voucher system that would create huge profits for insurers. She has taken $416,000 from big oil and voted to protect their massive tax breaks. And she’s sided with the billionaire Koch brothers more than 80 percent of the time, and benefited as their groups spent over $1 million attacking Maggie Hassan.
Ayotte has also resisted attempts by reformers to clean up the system. She’s voted against a constitutional amendment that would have overturned Citizens United, which lets these corporate special interests spend unlimited money to support her. She’s also voted three times to allow political donors to shield their identities. Permitting these secret and unlimited donations also opens the door for foreigners and foreign governments to meddle in our elections.
Muller added, “Senator Ayotte should drop her opposition to these reforms and call on her party bosses to bring the Senate back into session to hold a full and fair debate on them.”
End Citizens United PAC was established in March 2015 to counter the disastrous effects of Citizens United and reform our campaign finance system. To date, more than 1.5 million grassroots members from every state and territory have taken action to support End Citizens United.
Read more on ECU from the San Francisco Chronicle: End Citizens United Aggressively Seeks Campaign Finance Reform.