As our recent poll shows, 92% of Americans agree that Congress needs to take action to right the wrongs of the Citizens United decision. One way to start would be to pass a bill like the DISCLOSE Act to force big corporations to publicly reveal the money they spend to influence elections. Proponents of such legislation may worry that the corporate-leaning Supreme Court will overturn the bill after it’s passed – but they shouldn’t worry too much. With the exception of Justice Thomas, none of the Supreme Court Justices have expressed hostility to disclosure requirements – in fact, the most well known conservative Justice on the Court may even be an advocate. As SCOTUSblog pointed out in May, Justice Scalia has been a vocal supporter of transparency in democracy:

Justice Scalia [has] expressed the strong view that disclosure requirements do not implicate significant First Amendment concerns. To the concern that disclosure could deter expression, Justice Scalia responded, “[T]he fact is that running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage.”

This may be one of the only instances in which Justice Scalia is in line with the majority of Americans. As our recent poll shows, 89% of Americans support the transparency legislation like the DISCLOSE Act, although many (62%) believe such legislation wouldn’t go far enough to correct the outrageous Citizens United decision.

The American people are right again: just forcing corporations to disclose their political activities can’t fix Citizens United’s dangerous assertion that the 1st amendment guarantees unlimited corporate spending on elections, and conservative Justices – Scalia included – are likely to overturn any legislation that would. That’s why 77% of Americans believe that we need a constitutional amendment to insure that our democratic system isn’t drowned in corporate money. And 74 % say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate for Congress who pledged to support a Constitutional Amendment limiting corporate spending on elections.

UPDATE: The Supreme Court has weighed in more on the value of political disclosure in today’s decision in Doe v. Reed. We’ll post more on that later this morning.