Tom Williams/Roll Call via Getty Images

The only remedy to overturn Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission is a constitutional doomsday machine, which is exactly what Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico is trying to do.

The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission has become so iconic in the three years since it was handed down that it has come to be as much representative of the overall corruption and incompetence inherent in how we run our elections in this country, so much so that the diabolical cleverness of the decision itself sometimes gets lost in all the justified hooting about how Citizens United completed the process of legalizing bribery in this country. It is a shrewd piece of work. The decision was so carefully written that it contains within it language that guarantees that the decision will prevail over any piece of legislation, either nationally or in the states — which is how Montana's century-old law banning corporate political contributions was thrown out by the Supreme Court, which relied on CU to declare the Montana law unconstitutional — that seeks to mitigate its obvious impact. It is a constitutional doomsday machine set loose in the area of campaign finance. There is no remedy to it except to bring it down from the outside.

Which is what Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico is trying to do. "There's just no way around it," he says. "There's no way to get to transparency and disclosure as long as the decision stands. I don't see a way around it, anyway." Instead, Udall is the driving force to repeal Citizens United through a constitutional amendment. The amendment would give Congress the constitutional power to regulate the raising and spending of money in national elections, and it would give the states the same power to regulate spending in their elections. The amendment strikes at the fundamental heresy that lies at the heart of both Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo, the 40-year-old case that made CU inevitable, given the correct composition of a future Supreme Court: namely, that money is speech. To this, of course, was added the equally preposterous notion that corporations are people and that, therefore, they have the same free speech rights as you, me, and the guy on the next bar stool. (How preposterous? Google Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad some time and get a good look at how corporate personhood got birthed on the wrong side of the constitutional blanket.) Pass the amendment, and all of the entangled absurdity of Citizens United goes away. One doomsday machine takes out the other.

As a law student, Udall watched the Buckley case work its way through the system all the way to fruition. He was already a local district attorney in the 1980s when a constitutional amendment was proposed to overturn Buckley. (Udall's uncle, the late Congressman Mo Udall of Arizona, was one of the early supporters of that amendment and took campaign-finance reform as one of his signature issues when he ran for president in 1976.) He saw clearly where the country was headed once that decision was handed down. He heard the floodgates beginning to creak open.

"Back then, Mo and Dave Obey (the former Wisconsin congressman) believed that, if you could investigate, and find that campaign contributions injected corruption, or the appearance of corruption, into the system, then you could regulate it." Unfortunately, in its intricate tricks and traps, to borrow a phrase from Senator-elect Warren, Citizens United took care of that, too, with weathervane Anthony Kennedy famously opining within his crucial concurrence to the CU-based decision that struck down the Montana law that corporate independent campaign expenditures "do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." And thus are born Super Pacs and phony, covertly-financed 501(c) "welfare" organizations out of which come roaring a thousands attack ads.

"What they've done, essentially, is legalize money-laundering," Udall says. "You can shut down the 501(c) and then sluice the money into the campaign, and the secrecy around the donors is maintained. Secrecy has no place in a democracy and particularly not in the electoral process.

"Once you say that money is speech,then you get what we have now — a Supreme Court that's getting bolder and bolder in defending its decision. That's what you saw when the Montana law was struck down. They passed that law because they saw what unlimited and anonymous corporate money could do to democracy. Right now, there is no possible legal remedy to this decision on a national level. We have to go with a constitutional amendment because we have to take the Supreme Court head-on."

Udall has 26 senators lined up behind his amendment. There is growing popular support out in the country, as well. (Last July, a petition to overturn the decision garnered 2 million signatures.) Not only that, but the decision's defenders are growing just a tad desperate; Justice Samuel Alito gave a speech last week in which he floundered toward a defense of Citizens United's philosophical basis by comparing its effects on the political system to the New York Times company's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers — which Alito, spectacularly, cited as an example of corporate "speech." Still, the process of amending the Constitution is a long road and a hard one, because it's supposed to be, but to anyone who wants to rid the country of Citizens United and its progeny, and the long-term effects of a democracy up for bids, it is the only real way left to do it.

"The Supreme Court has been bold so we have to be bold in return," Tom Udall says. "That's the only way around it."