campaign finance reform
NeoNote — Campaign finance reform redux
❝❝My idea for campaign finance reform.NeoNotes are the selected comments that I made on other boards, in email, or in response to articles where I could not respond directly.
You can't contribute to a campaign unless you reside in the area affected by the campaign. No one from Phoenix could contribute to a city council election in Tucson, no one from California could contribute to a proposition in Nevada, and so on.
No anonymous contributions. A current public list of all contributions must be maintained.
Any unused funds must be returned proportionally to all contributors or to a specified charity. If someone contributed .01% of the campaign's funding, then they would receive .01% of any monies left over.
Violating any of these rules would render a candidate legally unable to serve in any public office until the end of term for the office they ran for. If they ran for Senate, violation would make them ineligible for six years. In the case of a ballot proposition, the election would be voided and must be held again.
Money is not speech. No matter what the USSC says.
If they want to spend money, they can do so in their own home. If they want to speak against someone, they can do that where ever and when ever. But someone in Idaho doesn't have to live with the aftermath of an election in Illinois.
It's part of my SUPER SECRET PLAN TO DESTROY THE POLITICAL PARTIES.
Don't tell anyone.
People forget that the party system wasn't created by the Constitution. Yet they essentially control the nomination process. Take the cash flow and war chests and political action groups away and the parties collapse.
All without arguing over if cash is free speech.
Oh, and banning corporate campaign contributions. And union contributions. And political "matching funds."
*grins*
Money isn't speech any more than money is press. Money is a tool, a way of keeping score, and power, but it is not speech.
If money was really speech, there would be no legal limit to campaign donations.
If someone has more money, does that mean they have a bigger right of free speech or a bigger right of the press? If that is the case, we might as well do away with elections and just hold auctions.
It's telling that prior to campaign finance "reform," no one thought otherwise. It's also telling that the CFR was used to restrict speech.
Just because the law says something doesn't mean it's so. I'm still convinced that anyone born with a penis is a male.
Under my proposal, there are two restrictions on donating money. You have to be a voter and you have to reside in the area affected by the election. These are the two restrictions that every other proposed form of campaign finance reform tries to do away with.❞❞
Comments
NeoNote — The process or the Republic?
I'm so very tired of progressive "elites" and reporters focusing on the "dirty tricks" of Republicans all while excusing the excesses of their own side.
Read More...My version of campaign finance reform
Monday - 01Nov2010 Filed in: Politics
Hoodwinking Congress - blast from the past (2005)
Buying Reform
❝❝Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.
"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."
It's a stark admission, but perhaps Treglia should be thanked for his candor.>snip<
But this money didn't come from little old ladies making do with cat food so they could send a $20 check to Common Cause. The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.
These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros' Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).
Not exactly all household names, but the left-wing groups that these foundations support may be more familiar: the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation . . .
What did this liberal foundation crowd buy with its $123 million?
For starters, a stable of supposedly independent pro-reform groups, with Orwellian names you may have heard in the press: the Center for Public Integrity, the William J. Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy 21 and so on.
Plus, favorable press coverage. Here, the story — as laid out in the Political Money Line report — gets really ugly.❞❞