Russ Feingold October 8, 2012
"While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era"
8:00 PM Monday, October 08, 2012
Dennison Theatre
"Campaign Finance in the Post Citizens United Era"
3:10 PM Monday, October 08, 2012
Gallagher Business Building 123
You are cordially invited to attend a seminar with Former Senator Russ Feingold. A former Rhodes Scholar and an honors law graduate of both Oxford and Harvard, he served for ten years in the Wisconsin Senate and eighteen years in the United States Senate. In Washington, he was highly esteemed for his studious and independent-minded approach to the complex issues before the Senate, particularly regarding intelligence, the budget, foreign relations, and the judiciary. He was the lone Senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act in 2001. After voting against the Iraq War in 2005, he became the first Senator to call for the United States to withdraw from that country. In 2006, he introduced a resolution in the Senate to censure President Bush for authorizing an illegal program to spy on American citizens on American soil and then misleading Congress and the public about the existence of the program. In his 2012 book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, he details our nation’s failure to respond adequately to the challenges that face us. Oversimplification and disinformation about terrorism, Islam, and our own policies have undermined the country’s capacity for right and effective action in the world.
Former Senator Feingold is best-known for his work with Senator John McCain of Arizona to clean up campaign finance abuses. The McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 sought to ban soft-money contributions to candidates and parties. Following the Citizens United decision to open the door for corporations to spend freely in elections, he denounced the Supreme Court as an arm of corporate America and then said: “This is one of the great turning points, not only in campaign finance, but also in our country’s history….I believe we’re in a constitutional crisis.” In the seminar, he will discuss his reasons for thinking that corporate interests in America, through the agency of the Supreme Court, resorted to Citizens United as a means of stopping citizen democracy in this country.