California Disclose ACT grows grassroots network

by Brian Leubitz

I don’t ordinarily post updates on every petition on legislation. There are just too many of them. However, the online and offline petitions for the California DISCLOSE Act are worthy of a mention.

On SignOn.org, MoveOn’s online petition site, three petitions already have over 53,000 signatures. Here are the links, where you can add your own name if you are so inclined:

Russ Feingold’s Progressives United Petition: Over 35K signatures

Clean Money Campaign’s petition: Over 16K signatures

Pat Johnstone, of Marin OFA and other grassroots fame: Nearly 1K signatures and nearly 500

This is in addition to the hard copy petitions that Clean Money Campaign and other volunteers have been gathering. If you were at the CDP convention over the last few years, you would have seen some of those petitions going around. By this point, the signature totals on those are probably enormous.

The California DISCLOSE Act is a simple proposal to require political funders to announce who they really are in political advertisements. It won’t stop anybody from spending gobs of cash on an initiative, or setting up an Independent Expenditure committee to promote or attack legislative candidates. However, it will force them to take ownership and responsibility for the words that they speak.