Obama Pounds Republican Leaders for Blocking Disclosure on Attack Ads

A running feud over what to do about a Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions on corporate and union spending on political advertising raged on Saturday as President Obama pounded Senate Republicans for blocking a bill that would force broad disclosure of the sponsors and financiers of such ads.
In his weekly address, using unusually strong rhetoric, Obama said the court's opinion giving wider latitude to the backers of campaign commercials has resulted in a "flood of deceptive attack ads sponsored by special interests, using front groups with misleading names." A number of the spots are airing in support of Republican candidates.
"We've tried to fix this with a new law -- one that would simply require that you say who you are and who's paying for your ad..." Obama said. "Yet the Republican leaders have so far said 'no.' They've blocked this bill from even coming up for a vote in the Senate. It's politics at its worst."
The remedial legislation, the president said, "is the kind of proposal that Democrats and Republican have agreed on for decades." The U.S. House has already passed a disclosure bill, aimed at the January Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which overturned a trend of limiting the power of corporations and unions to buy elections by pouring money directly into campaigns. Many companies and unions operated through political action campaigns.
Obama was so upset by the high court opinion that he denounced it in his State of the Union speech with some of the Supreme Court justices seated in front of him in the chamber f the House of Representatives.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) answered by asserting that Democrats are simply trying to get an upper hand in campaigns, the AP said. McConnell called it a "transparent effort to help themselves ahead of an election in which they clearly can't run on their record." Democrats, he said, "are proving once again that the jobs they care about most are their own."

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