coming up on r. and t. the supreme court takes on a case that may change future u.s. elections her public and party donors suing to have limits on campaign donations removed possibly opening the door to even more unlimited money in our elections the latest on this major case the head. and all the government shutdown continues congress remains in deadlock again today president obama said he will not negotiate on the debt limit with harsh words for the republicans on capitol hill more of the shutdown coming up then at the national mall many gathered at a rally in support of immigration reform they demand forward momentum on a reform bill that help the nation's millions of immigrants we'll take you to the rally later in tonight show.

it's tuesday october eighth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sax and you're watching our team the me begin with the supreme court that began its new term with a case that could further open the door to unlimited money and americans elections today the case is mccutcheon versus the federal elections commission with mccutcheon arguing that limits on how much an individual can spend in total donating to political campaigns every two years is a restriction on their first amendment rights to free speech now currently the f.e.c. regulates just how much money can be directly handed over to political candidates every two years you can only give at most twenty six hundred dollars to any one political candidate and you can only give out most thirty two thousand four hundred dollars to anyone national party committee limits also exist on aggregate contributions to limiting an individual from donating more than forty eight thousand six hundred dollars to the totality of candidates. here she supports and

seventy four thousand six hundred dollars to the totality of party committees that he or she supports that means the federal elections commission limits what an individual can spend every two years contributing directly to elections to one hundred twenty three thousand two hundred dollars that's the important number and the issue that the supreme court is taking up as sean mccutcheon an alabama businessman and frequent republican party donor argues that he should be able to spend as much money as he likes donating to as many candidates as he likes during the election season again mccutcheon isn't challenging the base limit you can give to one candidate which is a total of twenty six hundred dollars but the limit he can give to all candidates and all national committees of one hundred twenty three thousand two hundred dollars however the conservative supreme court justices in this case who've been growing more and more skeptical of any sort of limits on money in elections could rule on the case far more broadly and strike down those twenty six hundred dollar

individual limits too and that's because senate minority leader mitch mcconnell's lawyer who is making oral arguments or who made oral arguments in front of the supreme court today wants to strike down all limits on all campaign contributions and as we saw in two thousand and ten citizens united decision the high court hasn't backed away from taking a narrow court case and issuing a much broader ruling with significant changes to current electoral law so how might all this shake up and how and what are the political implications of this mccutcheon case well i was joined earlier by liz kennedy a counsel for demos and i was also joined by the two thousand and twelve green party presidential candidate dr jill stein and i started out by asking liz where does this court case fit in with these series of election law court cases we've recently heard by the supreme court and what direction might the court be leaning here. well this is a very important issue for folks to understand but it is also somewhat complicated

or can be the important thing to remember is that the supreme court has never struck down a federal contribution limit in fact the establishment of our current campaign finance jurisprudence the foundational case was buckley the last where in the court decided that spending limits put too much of a burden on core political speech and therefore spending limits an actual limit on an actual cap on how much anyone can spend in an election of their own money on their own independent speech they said that that could not be kept so that was essentially the decision in the citizens united saying that where justice kennedy found that independent spending wasn't corrupting which is something that we can come back to but however they have never cast a doubt on the importance of contribution limits guarding the financial relationships between big donors and their actual checks directly to candidates or

their campaign committees or the political parties because the court does understand that those has understood that those kind of financial relationships are far more open to real corruption concerns moreover it is not the direct to political speech it is actually just association or speech or being able when you contribute to someone else's campaign or to give someone money so that they can then fund their own speech that is less of a core political speech question and therefore the government has more power to regulate within that sphere. but the interesting thing here is now the citizens united it struck down the limits on you can't do. it but you can spend unlimited amount of money campaigning on behalf of the candidate with t.v. and radio ads and so forth so what does it matter much at this point if you. go and strike down the individual limits that you can directly hand money to a candidate it absolutely would and this is a question that was debated in the court this morning but justice kagan made

a very strong point saying if the court is now thinking that suddenly independent spend a chair is actually can be corrupting then they should recognize that the that the government ought to have power to put in place commonsense rules to protect our politics and our government from being captured by private economic power i mean that's really what we're talking about here and that's what the court has always recognized even when they cut back on our ability to have these particular rules they've understood that regulating in this sphere is important because otherwise what you see is a throwback to the robber baron era or even the watergate era watergate itself was premised on campaign contributions quid pro quo political favors you know the milk industry easily very clearly it's in the record in the watergate legislature hearings you know gave money in order to get

a price of favor on subsidies so this is the kind of bad democracy that we don't want to go back to that exists too often elsewhere too much big money elsewhere but we need to maintain the kind of protections that we currently have so much i want to bring up these two charts here now and they kind of sure the breakdown the individuals who met the contribution limits here the first is to contributions to individual candidates in the second is contributions to party committees and in both cases the individuals primarily donated to the republican party dr stein i want to bring you in on this now you have run for elections in this post the citizens united world you ran for president last year how difficult is it for parties and candidates who are now in corporate america's good graces. compete now let alone if this mccutcheon to just blows the doors off all contribution limits. yeah. i think you know from the point of view of

independent politics this makes it only much harder it goes from the frying pan into the fire. but that said you know it's it's it's very difficult right now it's been extremely difficult for a long time the key here is not so much what's happening to candidates i think is what's happening to the american people because as you know as alternative candidates are muzzled and silence and kept out of the media kept off the ballot and basically blocked by this big money system and its many manifestations you know it's not just the candidates but it's voters who are losing because what we have what we're left with are two parties that are just different around the edges people are are extremely. you know angry isn't the word for it not only with the supreme court and with congress and with this dismantling of the protections of our

campaign system that was put in place after watergate as was alluded to people want those protections kept in place they want them improved. you know and are very happy with everything very unhappy with everything from the stalemate on the budget the shutdown the threatened. debt debacle with the default on the debt look at for example the trans-pacific partnership which is being rammed through the congress right now this is the kind of policies that we get because money and politics has basically won the day the foxes are not just you know running the chicken coop they're devouring the chickens at the same time and the american people are paying the price one out of two in poverty thirty nine million students in debt. we saw the studies out of. recently out of i believe stanford or berkeley actually showing that ninety five percent of all

economic increases all income benefits since the disaster of two thousand and seven have gone to the one percent let me say that again ninety five percent of all benefits have gone to the one percent and if you look at the economy as a whole the top one percent has commanded fifty percent of the wealth in the resources while the bottom fifty percent has access to one percent one's wrong with this picture money and the economic and political elite are basically ruling the day but the american people are not being fooled and i think that's what's hopeful is that we need to exert pressure on the supreme court on congress in our elections and out in the street you know fundamentally that's how we're going to get out of this mess because i think you brought up an interesting point there dr stanley and i want to get your opinion here on this too is that the

way the american people view money in politics in two thousand and eleven we saw the occupy movement highlight this problem money in politics we see growing distrust of politicians in the corrupting influences you just talked about dr side and you know the supreme court appears to be going in the opposite direction we had citizens united and now the possibility possibilities in this mccutcheon case first you doctor sort of how do you explain this disconnect. yeah well i think they are logically responding to their masters and by they i mean particularly congress the white house you know who makes the appointments to the supreme court the supreme court responds to them and also the public pressure and we've seen the supreme court turn around we saw it in brown versus board of education in the one nine hundred fifty s. where the supreme court reversed itself after supporting segregation for four decades of the supreme court suddenly began to support integration in the schools you know i think what we're seeing in the supreme court and in our elected

officials are basically a reflection of the power of intensely concentrated economic and political power in the hands of the one percent which is why we've got to fight this in every way possible you know i think it's important for people to weigh in with the supreme court with their congressmen and women and with the president that this is unacceptable that we cannot dismantle these protections in the same way that it is unacceptable to be holding the budget and the full faith and credit of the united states of america hostage here and what's basically an extortion game being played by the top one percent of schoenberg was busted on this issue but between this disconnect between what the american people view money and politics now the supreme court seems to be ruling in these cases well sam i think that is a very good point and i really want to respond to dr sign and thank her for raising so many important points because we do see eight in ten americans saying that large campaign contributions are blocking important necessary progress on critical issues

that we face in this country issues about upward middle mobility and more you know addressing our economic inequality if you such as addressing climate change or cutting health care costs and so the real issue here is the way in which the money in our elections actually plays out in our policy six in ten americans thinking that their elected represent. that is are more responsive to their big donors and to voters or the public interest that is simply not a situation for a healthy democracy so what i would say is the supreme court obviously was pretty court's role is to you know interpret the constitution and to determine what applying various balancing tasks make sure that that constitutional rights are protected that's critically important the first amendment is a pillar of our you know structure of who we are as a people and yet it is currently actually being just beyond the beyond

it's real true meaning is the what we would say about the current interpretation because what they're not understanding is the first amendment rights of the people who are being drowned out of the system and there was less kennedy a council for demas and dr jill starr who actually stayed on with me to discuss the next topic the government shutdown which is now in week two and isn't any closer to reopening or at least finding a way to raise the debt limit in the next ninety days either the morning president obama called speaker of the house john boehner to according to bangerz office remind the speaker that he won't negotiate over raising the debt limit and earlier today the president also faced the media in a news conference where he had this to say the american people do not get to demand a ransom for doing their jobs. you don't get a chance to call your bank and say i'm going to pay my mortgage this month unless you throw in a new car an x. box. if you're in the gauche ations around buying somebody's house you don't get to say well let's talk about the price i'm going to pay and if you don't give me the

price then i'm going to burn down your house meanwhile c.n.n. has proposed a few different scenarios for any mashad down debate take a look. kicking the bums out or three in a steel cage death match ok so number three is a joke but admittedly it's the most desired outcome because i'd pay to watch that now once again i spoke earlier with dr jill stein from the green party who just last year ran for president obama's job and i first asked dr stein what's her take on what's going on top of the hill right now. you know this is like the run up to the fiscal cliff which created this you know incredible crisis and this sense of doom and gloom so that when congress and the president. settled that crisis by making the bush tax cuts permanent. and getting rid of the estate tax for example doing

a whole lot of favors to the one percent you know it didn't look so bad because it looked like oh gee at least we didn't go over that cliff in a sense you know this is one can't help but suspect that suspect that that's what's going on now as well that this is the creation of a crisis atmosphere wall street and you know the one percent or corporate sponsors all of them they're not going to allow the meltdown of the international economy and the stock market and all the rest the financial infrastructure of the economy and their profits it's highly unlikely that they would allow that to take place in the same way they would not allow you know the the initial bailouts in two thousand and seven there was a big movement to stop them but wall street you know kicked then with a lobbying effort that had never been seen before and stopped at the odds are they

will not allow that fiscal disaster to happen but it's very convenient because it creates a smokescreen in which to create fundamentally the you know the the bargain the grand bargain that the president has been talking about for at least the last four years whereby he makes he cuts a deal in which social security and medicare get taken down substantially and he looks like a hero because he averted this desperate. you know fiscal. meltdown with the with the budget fault right well i think well i think you're touching on something that's not getting as much attention in this debate between shutdowns and elements and that's austerity at this point it's all but guaranteed that any deal to reform the government will include austerity spending cuts the sequester the president talked about today have democrats have already caved on this issue why have both parties signed on to this economic agenda that's proving to be pretty

harmful to working people in europe and on a state level across the country it's horrific and the academic basis for it which was a paper out of harvard. this reinhart wrote off debate paper that justified. drastic measures to shrink the budget deficit that was proven to be wrong it was a fallacious study that was shown by a graduate student at the university of massachusetts out in in am hers that looked at the numbers and found that there were major errors in the excel program that was calculating this so even that one study on which they were basing these drastic draconian cuts all over the world it was proven wrong but still they are just you know they're in lockstep they're committed to this dismantling of the remnants of the new deal and the great society and all that this is part of what happens what justice louis brandeis referred to when he talked about we have

a choice between a democracy or vast concentrations of wealth and what i referred to before about the top one percent having fifty percent of all the wealth in the nation it's like you have one hundred people in the room and one hundred loaves of bread one person has fifty loaves of bread and the fifty scrawny asst most malnourished people in the room all get to share one loaf of bread that's what the economy looks like today in the united states and it's only getting worse the consequence. answers of that very. unfair. economy is tremendous power of the economic elite which is in bed with the political elite in both of the political parties the two major political parties and they silence alternative voices why because when the american people hear those alternative voices it's their own voices that they are hearing and they will support them we've seen that

before so you know this is a completely logical system in which greed and. avarice are are just running wild running rampant over our economy and our political system it's altogether reflected in that case before the supreme court and with the changes around citizens united as well so it's really important for us to come together across many issues and stand up for people peace in the planet there are some of our them who are sort of a we're fresh out of time there dr jill stein the two thousand and twelve green party presidential candidate that is so much great to be with you think. moving on earlier this year the senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform plan but it's going nowhere in the house today with congress focused on shutdowns and debt limits immigration reform or want to make sure their cause the eleven million undocumented immigrants in america hasn't

been forgotten that's why today they rallied on the national mall and some hours ago multiple lawmakers including congressman keith ellison charlie rangle raul grijalva luis gutierrez were rest to rally participated lopez was there earlier here's her report. but we are officially and weak. the government shutdown lawmakers just a little bit away from here on capitol hill are still arguing to get even a temporary spending bill passed and this is coming on a time when we're still very close to a default as a result of the debt limit were supposed to reach that in just a few days here but in terms of the national mall every museum here is one of those as a result of that partial government shutdown however that doesn't mean that the mall is completely out of commission behind me is an immigration rally where thousands of people are supposed to be gathering today to tell congress that in the middle of this budget battle and in the middle of this debt crisis there is still an

overarching issue that needs to be discussed and that is immigration reform for the eleven million undocumented people that are currently living in this country and this country is supposed to be about democracy we have eleven million people with no rights my rights are no different than their rights when their rights are under attack so are mine despite a furlough on twenty thousand employees the national park service and obama administration allowed the protest to happen today it's a decision that infuriated republican members of congress who say park police should focus on allowing war veterans to visit national monuments rather than illegal immigrants to gather on the national mall that's it is being called a national day of dignity and respect for immigration reform. one hundred and fifty cities are expecting to hear or see the some type of rally or profile going on and obviously what you see behind me and the fear is the face of the manifestation of that i mean for immigration reform now i have a chance to take

a few in number of people here at the rally and they have told me one thing why this protest is different from all the other friends have all the other rallies that we've seen in the past we have been waiting for the immigration reform for a long time and nothing cup in their government always have some for all the priorities and i think that this time that we eleven million of people who seem. to need to do real legal in this country under fourteen to be come see this is what they're like everybody else people are hoping the last bulleen. we already know this. lives with tried to do it one more time rally organizers expect tens of thousands of people to show up at family gratian rally today only a fraction of that actually did end up turning out about a thousand people i know but some members of congress did stop by including congresswoman nancy pelosi and also d.c. mayor vincent gray we strongly support immigration reform and we've tried to

demonstrate that by our actions in the city. refusing to you know enforce and implementing what we call secure communities the immigration reform is good border brought a different reasons for me personally obviously my parents are immigrants and so that i understand personally but we've got an issue here in our country about a broken immigration system for years we've got a lot of people here that came in here but now we have to resolve the issue to make sure that that we keep families together but also take appreciation for the fact that a lot of the work really hard especially in my part of the country after the planned speech is from immigration activists and lawmakers as well as a special performance find a popular mexican band los to grace these and. this took their protest right to the steps of capitol hill a planned moment of civil disobedience resulted in the arrests of dozens of protesters as well as several congress members including congressman keith ellison charlie rangle and luis gutierrez the senate has already passed

a sweeping bill that would revamp the legal immigration system and allow the nation's undocumented families to apply for citizenship within thirteen years but the house of representatives has yet to come up with any comprehensive piece of legislation and the longer the shutdown showdown continues the less likely it is that a pathway to citizenship will actually be paved so once again all eyes are on congress as these people wait for reform in washington meghan lopez r.t. . we're no less than two weeks away from the u.s. reaching its debt limit or i should say bursting through its debt limit a limit that has been increased many times since nation's founding usually with little drama and the world hopes that the u.s. debt limit will be raised and avoid any potential harm to the world economy if congress fails to act for a closer look at this issue the residents florrie her finished. with.

the u.s. debt ceiling is currently sixteen point six nine nine trillion dollars we've already reached that amount and we're set to start running out of money on october seventeenth so if we don't raise our debt limit by then we just falls on our debt and our checks start bouncing the u.s. treasury issued a report saying in the event of a default the u.s. economy could be plunged into a recession worse than anything we've seen since the great depression. that would be terrifying except for the fact that this happens over and over again since nineteen sixty congress has raised at the debt ceiling seventy eight times and yet

still the media and the government go into histrionics every time we approach the limit this time around our congress is once again politicizing the debt limit for the benefit of their own party republicans are in leveling it as a talking point against spending money on obamacare democrats are loving it as a talking point against the big baby that the republican party has become and all of the hysteria people have started to call on president obama to invoke the fourteenth amendment. to bypass the debt limit altogether the fourteenth amendment was ratified in eight hundred sixty eight america was just getting off the ground so our forefathers thought it might be a good idea to write something on the importance of the us paying its bills the language from this amendment state that the validity of the public debt of the united states shall not be questioned is a fancy way of saying hey america don't be insured to pay off your debt. when the

fourteenth amendment was written i'm pretty sure this isn't what the writers had in mind i'm pretty sure they were thinking hey our political parties will become complete babies who will use any system of checks and balances as a way to give their party more power and better talking points. regardless of the original intention so writers of the fourteenth amendment seem to have been extremely president in writing it clearly they would realize that we would need someone to tell us have a moron stop spending what you don't have and pay off your debt think about your grandchildren and the debt you were forcing them to inherit. too bad two hundred fifty years later in the us we neither care about the future of our grandchildren nor do we care to heed the wisdom of our grandfathers our spending knows no

limit tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the residence. and that does it for now for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r.t. america or check out our web site r t v dot com slash usa and you can follow me on twitter sam sax and don't forget to tune in at nine pm for larry king now special guest is the famous judge judy to talk about her syndicated t.v. series and much much much more until then take it easy.

mission. critical should free. store charges free. range month free. three stooges free. old free book counseling videos for your media projects a free media oh don carty dot com. welcome to the kaiser report i'm max kaiser good news at last for the british economy yes apparently there is an upside to all that financial fraud at least.