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Hillary Clinton made a surprising move this week. It wasn't running for president — she'd already set the stage for that — but embracing the idea of a constitutional amendment to restrict or eliminate big money in politics.

The notion of amending the Constitution this way has been discussed, literally for decades. But Clinton is joining a new, if small, chorus of prominent politicians who are talking it up.

"We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccounted money out of it, once and for all, even if that takes a constitutional amendment," she said to a gathering at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa.

Campaign finance reform is one of four pillars, "four big fights," of her campaign, she said, along with help for families and communities; a stronger, more balanced economy; and a strong national defense.

Activist groups have toiled for such an amendment since 2010, when the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision let corporate and union money directly into partisan politics.

Clinton spoke a few days after Republican Lindsey Graham's most recent comments on a possible amendment.

"The next president of the United States needs to get a commission of really smart people and find a way to create a constitutional amendment to limit the role of superPACs," said Graham, a senator from South Carolina who is weighing a presidential run. He was appearing on WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H.

SuperPACs were created after Citizens United and a related appellate ruling, as political committees that raise unrestricted contributions from wealthy donors, corporations and unions. SuperPAC donors are publicly disclosed. Along with 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations, which have no disclosure as well as no contribution limits, superPACs are fueling the boom in bare-knuckle, lavishly financed campaigning by noncandidate, nonparty groups.

President Obama said yes to amending the Constitution in 2012, in a Q&A session on Reddit, and again last month, in an interview on the website Vox. "I would love to see some constitutional process that would allow us to actually regulate campaign spending, the way we used to, and maybe even improve it," he told Vox.

Campaign spending has been constitutionally protected since a 1976 Supreme Court decision known as Buckley v. Valeo. The justices said Congress could not regulate political spending, because it was tantamount to free speech. All subsequent attempts to control political money have had to work around the Buckley distinction between contributions and spending.

Former Democratic presidential candidate and New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley said as early as the 1990s that a constitutional amendment was needed to overturn Buckley. In 2012, he told NPR's Talk Of The Nation, "You need a constitutional amendment that says federal, state and local governments may limit the amount of money in a campaign."

But back to Clinton. At People for the American Way, one of the groups mobilizing for an amendment, Executive Vice President Marge Baker said Clinton's statement can help the effort.

"When the leading candidate for president says she's going to make reducing the influence of money in politics one of the four pillars in her campaign, you know that that's going to be a major issue in 2016," Baker said. "So this is a very, very big deal."

Clinton drew a charge of hypocrisy from Republican Gov. Chris Christie, of New Jersey. Not a declared presidential candidate, he was stumping in New Hampshire.

"She intends to raise $2.5 billion for her campaign. But she wants to then get the corrupting money out of politics," he said to laughter at a town hall meeting. "It's classic, right? It's classic politician-speak."

In Congress this year, lawmakers have introduced nine resolutions proposing constitutional amendments — typically proposing to restrict political spending, or bar corporate spending in politics, or overturn the Supreme Court's 129-year-old precedent of giving corporations the constitutional standing of people.

Republican leaders on Capitol Hill simply say nobody should mess with the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky made the point on the Senate floor last fall.

"If the Democrats who run Washington are so determined to force the Senate into debate over repealing the free speech protections of the First Amendment, then fine, let's have a full and proper debate," he said.

Democrats wanted a Senate vote on a constitutional amendment, and they got it. The proposal passed, 54 to 42 — 13 short of the two-thirds majority required for a proposed amendment. Ratification also requires a two-thirds vote in the House, and approval from 38 states.

Republican lawyer Trevor Potter has long worked for tougher campaign finance laws. He was the lawyer for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., when the Senate passed the McCain-Feingold bill in 2001. It's the last major campaign finance law to emerge from Congress. But now, Potter says a constitutional amendment poses problems that only start with ratification.

Potter said, "Beyond that is the issue of what is it that the amendment would say, and how would it be effective?"

These are questions of language that might go too far, or not far enough, or lie open to reinterpretation by future Supreme Courts.

So far, the answers don't satisfy all of big money's critics.

Susan Stamberg is a big name in public radio. One of NPR's "founding mothers," she was the first woman to anchor a national nightly news program when she co-hosted NPR's All Things Considered for 14 years. Listeners hear her reports as a special correspondent, and every year at Thanksgiving, her mother's cranberry relish recipe returns to the air.

But Stamberg's career began its ascent with a nervous mistake.

"My big break occurred essentially at the moment I made my radio debut," she says.

Stamberg was working at a local station in Washington, D.C., producing a daily program when the weather girl called in sick. Stamberg says the format called for a weather forecast.

"There was nobody else to do it," she says. "It was up to me."

Back in those days, Stamberg says, you would dial W-E-6-1-2-1-2 on a phone to get the weather report. She was supposed to write down the forecast and bring her notes into the studio for her live report.

"But I was so nervous I forgot to call," Stamberg says. "So I go into the studio, the on-air light comes on, and I think, 'I don't know what the weather is because I didn't make the phone call.' "

She thought she could just look out the window — but the only window in the studio was out of reach and covered with curtains.

She was in the dark.

"So I did the only thing I could think of to do," Stamberg says. "I made it up."

i

The earliest photo of Susan Stamberg at a microphone, age 25. Later, as the host of All Things Considered, she was the first woman to be a full-time anchor of a U.S. national nightly news broadcast. Courtesy Susan Stamberg hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy Susan Stamberg

The earliest photo of Susan Stamberg at a microphone, age 25. Later, as the host of All Things Considered, she was the first woman to be a full-time anchor of a U.S. national nightly news broadcast.

Courtesy Susan Stamberg

She says it was in the middle of February, but she was so nervous, she said the temperature was in the 90s.

"And that the barometer was — I didn't even know what that meant," she says. "And then the format called for me to repeat what the weather was. And I couldn't remember what I had said because I was so nervous."

So, Susan Stamberg made it up again.

"Now I say it's 62 degrees and the wind and the velocity is 109 and I went on and on and on," Stamberg says. "Mercifully, got off the air and happily our three listeners did not call. So nobody noticed that, anyway."

But Stamberg says her not-so-glamorous on-air debut taught her a couple things about being on the radio: Never go on the air unprepared and never lie to your listeners.

"I think I was so petrified and so relieved when I was finished," she says. "But yeah, something in the back of my head said, 'You know, this could be fun.' So this was the beginning of my inauspicious broadcasting career."

We want to hear about your big break. Send us an e-mail at mybigbreak@npr.org.

Susan Stamberg

A collection of art and others artifacts related to the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II will not be sold to the highest bidder.

A New Jersey auction house was set to sell more than 400 items on Friday. But Rago Arts and Auction Center decided to withdraw the items on Wednesday after protests from descendants of internees who were wrongfully imprisoned by the U.S. government during the war.

Japanese-American families had donated many of the pieces to Allen Eaton, an historian who was working on a book published in 1952 about arts and crafts from the internment camps.

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The collection also includes containers and furniture that Japanese-American internees made from scrap lumber found inside the internment camps. Courtesy of Rago Arts and Auction Center hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Rago Arts and Auction Center

The collection also includes containers and furniture that Japanese-American internees made from scrap lumber found inside the internment camps.

Courtesy of Rago Arts and Auction Center

Over the decades, the collection came into the hands of an anonymous friend of the Eaton family. He decided to auction them off, which caught the attention of Japanese-Americans like Barbara Takei, who helped to lead online protests against the sale.

"This has been a very intense two weeks," says Takei, whose mother was among the thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent forced to live in internment camps after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

David Rago, one of the auction house's owners, says the ideal solution to the controversy is to find a museum to house the items. "We want to see the property end up where it can do the most good for history, and I do believe the consigner wants that as well," he says.

The collection includes carved wooden nameplates that were once attached to tar-paper barracks, as well as oil and watercolor paintings of Japanese-American families living behind barbed wire.

"We're talking about items that were produced by prisoners, who were wrongfully concentrated into absolutely abysmal places," says historian Marc Masurovsky, who co-founded the Holocaust Art Restitution Project.

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There are parallels between the paintings Jewish families lost during World War II and the artifacts of Japanese-American internment camps. Masurovsky says descendants of both groups deserve a say in what happens to these objects.

"It's a healing process," he says. "And that's why you have to have that kind of sensibility and sensitivity, and sit down and recognize that and accept it so that an element of justice can be performed."

The internment camp artifacts may not have the same financial value as masterpieces of European painting. But they were among the few possessions of Japanese-American families devastated by a chapter of U.S. history that left many penniless and without a home after the war.

Delphine Hirasuna, an expert on art created in the camps, says they're high in emotional value.

"Most families have nothing from that period to show for it," she says. "Here is something that gives them pride about what they're grandparents created under really bad circumstances."

The circumstances of Takei's protests may have changed now that the auction's called off. But she says the story isn't over.

"It's the beginning of a different chapter," she says. "Now we have time to begin exploring how best to preserve it, so that it won't be scattered to the wind."

The Rago auction house says it will now work with Japanese-American groups to help the collection's owner decide where the artifacts go.

It's fair to say George Lucas is a person who has had a lot of attention paid to him.

Largely because of his creation of the Star Wars universe (though he also co-wrote the story of Raiders Of The Lost Ark), Lucas is a figure of enormous pop-cultural weight. When he sat down to talk with Stephen Colbert as part of the Tribeca Talks series at the Tribeca Film Festival, expectations were high. The challenge, however, is that in terms of hearing him tell stories, the majority of the people who want to hear him talk want to hear about Star Wars, and at this point, almost 40 years on, Lucas doesn't have all that much to say about Star Wars that he hasn't already said.

He remains polite and noncommittal about the upcoming Star Wars films in which he isn't involved: he hopes they're great, he's excited to see them. He remembers showing the film to a bunch of his friends at the time — and regardless of who was at this actual screening, his friends included your Marty Scorsese, your Brian De Palma, your Steve Spielberg, that kind of thing — and only Spielberg believed Star Wars would be successful. Brian De Palma, for the record, didn't get what "The Force" was. Almost nobody got it. Almost nobody believed in it. This is the story as he tells it.

In some ways, the revelations about Star Wars came from Colbert, who opened by explaining that as a 13-year-old, he won tickets to an advance screening of the film, knowing essentially nothing about what it was. He said that as he and a couple of his friends arrived, they were given two things: a blue ticket that was taken at the door and a button that said "May The Force Be With You." Colbert still has the button, and he insisted that on the way out of the theater, he and his friends were so profoundly affected that they already knew they'd want those tickets as souvenirs, so they asked for them back. No dice: already gone.

This is what the Star Wars story is now — it's less the story of how a movie that's been exhaustively documented was made, and more the story of the extraordinary cultural force that it created. This entire thing has largely gotten away from George Lucas, not just in that he no longer helms the movies in the franchise, but in that Star Wars is now culturally — though certainly not legally — in a sort of public domain space. It's mashed up and remembered and used as a marker: for Colbert, as he explained it, this was the moment when everything became different. At an event after he became a celebrity himself, Colbert said he was so unprepared when someone suggested "George" wanted to meet him that he asked, "George who?" This could not, he assumed, mean George Lucas.

Lucas has settled into the life of the restless gazillionaire dabbler, or at least into the narrative of one: he himself told the audience he's "retired," "just screwing around in [his] garage," and devoted to making little experimental films — something he's been saying for years. He told Colbert he doesn't like celebrity. In fact, when Colbert opened by asking him, "What's it like to be George Lucas? Is it good?" Lucas answered, "It's ... OK."

This is what George Lucas does now: He talks about the importance of creatives and the terrible people who interfere with them, he talks about the meaninglessness of criticism that doesn't come from his friends who are directors (in fact, he says there should be no such thing as negative reviews; it should be as he claims it is in Europe, where critics who don't like things simply say nothing at all), and he gently brags about having, at this point in his life, what we might call "get-lost money": the money to ignore other people with money because you have plenty of your own and can do what you want.

That's why the most enjoyable moment of the talk might have been when Lucas unleashed a wonderfully shriek-y sneeze. I've heard so much about George Lucas, I've heard him talk about Star Wars, I know about his passion for sound, I know about his early movies, I know about his director friends. But I've never heard him sneeze before.

But for all the ways in which Lucas can seem like old business that doesn't change, the spell he still casts on people is remarkable. During the audience Q&A at the end of the event, a young man stood up and told his story: He's 21 years old. When he was young, his now-deceased grandfather got him started with Moleskin notebooks, in which he began writing down ideas. He now has 10 notebooks full of ideas, and here was his question: maybe he could help George Lucas somehow?

This is the hold Lucas still has over people's imaginations. This is what it still means, decades later, to be in a room with the guy who made Star Wars. There is a uniquely 21-year-old quality to this story — it's the time in your life when you still believe that with adequate chutzpah, with the ability to stand up and tell George Lucas right to his face that you are a writer and you can help him, you can skip over the boring parts like pitching your projects to people who can fund them. This is what George Lucas told him, really. Not "Let's have lunch!" Not "Meet me out back; I'd like to read your stuff." Not "Give my assistant your name and I'll call you next week." None of the things one suspects he may have hoped for. George Lucas told him to do the work. Go try to make deals.

Colbert offered, not unkindly, to translate: "Go to Hollywood and suffer."

A few other items of note:

Colbert is warming up to take over David Letterman's 11:35 p.m. slot at CBS, and he proved — out of "Stephen Colbert" character — to be a solid and warm interviewer.

Lucas said his favorite compliment is that a film is a "cult classic," because that means a small number of people love a movie so much that they carry it on their backs to that status. "Even Howard The Duck is a cult classic," he said, before predicting that Marvel would remake it now that they can use, as he put it, "a digital duck."

Unlike some directors, George Lucas isn't offended if you want to watch his movies on your phone. They're made for big screens, he said, and they're best seen in a big theater with a good sound system and a lot of other people. But ultimately, it's up to you: "If you want to see it on a cell phone, that's fine with me. You just won't get the same experience."