After Richard Nixon resigned 40 years ago Saturday, post-Watergate campaign finance reforms were enacted. Today’s Supreme Court has gutted those laws. To undo the rulings, Sen. Bernie Sanders supports a constitutional amendment that the Senate will vote on in September. On Thursday, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill by Sanders to help veterans get timely access to quality health care. The crime was worse than the fine, Sanders said after reports on Wednesday that Bank of America agreed to pay $17 billion for its role in the 2008 economic crisis. 

VA Bill Signed by Obama President Barack Obama on Thursday signed into law a bill to help veterans get timely access to quality health care.  As the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee chairman, Sanders played a leading role in crafting the bill. He joined Obama at the bill-signing ceremony at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, an Army base near Washington, D.C. “In a dysfunctional Congress, I’m glad we accomplished something significant for veterans. This legislation will go a long way toward ending unacceptably long waiting times for veterans to access health care and allow the VA the resources to hire the doctors, nurses and other medical staff it needs to address these problems over the long term.”  The $16.3 billion measure allows the VA to hire thousands of doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Veterans who have experienced long delays for appointments or who live far from a VA facility will be able to get care from private doctors. The measure also makes it easier for the new VA secretary to fire or demote senior VA executives. The Associated Press called the measure “one of the few significant bills approved this year by both the House and the Senate.”

Too Big to Jail The tentative deal involves the bank’s sale of toxic securities backed by home loans. “The greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Bank of America and other Wall Street firms caused a horrendous recession which cost millions of Americans their homes, jobs and life savings. Given the reality that, as part of the bailout, the Bank of America received more than $1 trillion in virtually zero-interest loans and that nobody from the company has yet gone to jail, this is a very modest settlement,” Sanders said.

Corporate Deserters Walgreens, the giant drugstore chain, announced on Wednesday that it will keep its headquarters in the Chicago area instead of claiming an overseas corporate home in Switzerland in order to lower its U.S. tax bill. But a growing number of other U.S. companies have completed or are considering a tax dodge known as inversions. Pfizer and Chiquita are part of what the non-partisan Congressional Research Service called a new wave of inversions that are raising concerns about an erosion of the U.S. tax base. “Corporate deserters,” Sanders called companies that use the loophole to siphon off tax revenue from the United States. He proposed legislation to yank government contracts from businesses that set up addresses in foreign tax havens. Already, one in four U.S. corporations use tax havens like the Cayman Islands to avoid paying any U.S. income tax at all.

Watergate  The Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon’s presidency also brought on laws to limit campaign contributions, bar corporate donations and require public disclosure of campaign finances. Today, however, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has dismantled many of the post-Watergate campaign reforms. Sanders and others have proposed amending the Constitution to undo the court’s rulings. “When large corporations and a few wealthy families can spend unlimited sums of money to buy and sell politicians, it is now clear to most Americans that the foundation of American democracy is under severe attack,” Sanders wrote in an essay for The Progressive magazine. Read The Progressive