Since Al Franken was elected in 2008, he has rarely granted interviews to the national media, reflecting his commitment to be taken seriously as a senator who works for his constituents.   In this rare interview with Lawrence O’Donnell last night, he added some needed context to the seemingly inexplicable action of Senate Republicans voting to proceed with debate to consider overturning Citizens United.  The whole segment is well worth watching.  Here’s text of some highlights:

Lawrence:  The senate voted 79-18 to proceed to debate overturning CU.  Sen. Franken, how did you get 79 votes in the Senate?  This is astonishing.

Sen. Franken:

I don’t want to disillusion you, I know you were the staff director of the Finance Committee under Senator Moynihan. Procedural votes are sometimes taken for cycnical reasons. Every time we have tried to reverse Citizens United the Republicans have stopped us. I think this vote was to slow down action in the Senate on other things such as equal pay, student loans, minimum wage… Every time we’ve tried to reverse this horrible decision made on a 5-4 basis to put in undisclosed and unlimited amounts of money into campaigns we’ve been stopped by the Republicans and I would love to think we’re going to pass this but we’re not.

We will have 30 hours to debate and we plan to use that time to make our case.

This is about unlimited undisclosed money. The vast majority of Americans know that this is wrong. Between the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 we saw outside money triple from 330 million to over a billion dollars and this is undisclosed, most of it. We don’t know who is putting the money in

I’ve been asking Americans to go to alfranken.com and sign the petition for reversing Citizens United. We’ve had over 600 thousand Americans sign up so far.

I don’t think we’re going to get the constitutional amendment through right away. But that’s why public opinion is so important because nothing moves politicians like public opinion.

Watch:

http://player.theplatform.com/p/2E2eJC/EmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_lw_Cfranken_140908_303739