Bernie Sanders Chillingly Lays Out How The Koch Brothers Could Buy the White House

Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:38 pm

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On MSNBC, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) laid out in chilling fashion how much money the Koch brothers are now free to spend to buy the White House.

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Transcript:

Chris Jansing: We’ve talked a lot on this program about how two years ago we had a billion dollar campaign for president. If you wanted to run a lot of folks are saying you’d better be able to look at two billion dollars this time. Now, of course, the flood gates are open, and I really wonder, because you’ve talked about running for president. What does it mean for a candidacy like yours? What does it mean for the presidential race overall?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): Let me tell you what I think. The Koch brothers who are now worth eighty billion dollars. Last year saw their wealth increase by twelve billion dollars. When you talk about Obama and Mitt Romney both spending a little bit more than a billion for their campaigns. What do you think it would mean to the Koch brothers to say we’re going to throw a couple billion dollars into the presidential election. It is nothing. It is a small fraction of what they earned last year.

So this decision plus Citizens United is a terrible disservice to the American people. We need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and, in fact, we need public funding of elections, so that all candidates have a fair shot at getting elected, and they get judged by their ideas by what they are fighting for, and not by the bank accounts of their campaign sponsors.

If a candidate wins the White House because a wealthy billionaire spent billions on their campaign, it is clear who they will be beholden to. An example of what Koch dollars have been able to buy can be seen in the behavior of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. House Republicans reject the will of a majority of the American people on a daily basis.

They don’t care about what the American people want because they answer to the wealthy donors who fund their campaigns. It is impossible to say with a straight face that House Republicans are doing the people’s business, because they have made it clear that they work for the Koch brothers.

Imagine that behavior transferred to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Koch brothers are going to double or triple their efforts to buy the White House in 2016. So far, they and Sheldon Adelson have not been able to successfully get a president elected, but their efforts represent the greatest internal threat to our representative democracy since the Civil War.

Sen. Sanders has made the threat clear, and it is up to the American people to beat back this challenge.


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