What astonishes me is that it's actually stayed reasonably polite!Pdxfashionpioneer wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 9:23 pmI am flattered that my post has lead to so many responses and frustrated that so many of you apparently weren't paying attention during your high school history and civics classes.
This is going to be a very tough nut to crack, and it'll likely take somebody of the calibre of Teddy Roosevelt to do it.There is no question that the role of money in our political process is pervasive and pernicious. In light of the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision, what, Carl, is your strategy for reining that money in? Keep in mind, Supreme Court decisions on matters like that have the weight of the Constitution. That is, you either have to be very clever in writing a law to circumvent the decision or pass a Constitutional amendment.
Put to it, I suspect I'd turn to tax law as the primary tool. You can't prohibit unlimited "donations" because of Citizens United, but you ought to be able to tax them into oblivion so as to make it highly unprofitable for the big donors to sway things. Taxing political "donations" at, say, 90% would likely put a stop to much of the practise, especially if the proceeds were then used to finance real public campaigns rather than the highly-staged spectacle we see today. I'd also see to it that PACs and the like are not tax-exempt like 501c3 enterprises.
Is this an attempt a humour? Satire, recall, is a dead art form. With the way things are stacked at the moment the idea of getting a President and a Senate that give one whit about the common man is entirely laughable. Even if it was possible, it won't come for years and years until the ideologues on the Supreme Court die off or retire, and are replaced with rational forward-thinking individuals of character and integrity.Or, get the Supreme Court to change it's mind by electing a President and Senate that share your feelings about campaign finances, change the political composition of the Court and then pass a law contravening Citizen's United under the expectations that 1) someone will contest the law (slam-dunk), 2) the case will make its way to the Supreme Court (ditto) and then 3) this new court will throw out Citizen's United and uphold the new law (crapshoot).
There are a few options i can think of, all of which are long-shots in the face of Citizens United. Reforming the way that campaigns are handled now would be a good first step, if only by shortening the "campaign season" to, say, 6 weeks (this will lower the price-barrier to entry somewhat); switch to publicly-financed campaigns which would, again, tend to level out the playing field; mandate a certain absolute maximum amount of money allowed to be spent on advertising; mandate equal time for candidates in the media, irrespective of a media outlet's editorial bent. Finally, it's time for the general population to tell "both" major parties that we've had it. Pick the least toxic third-party and vote for that, essentially boycotting the "two" majors. If a major-party candidate is running unopposed, leave the box empty. (Change the election laws to reflect that a blank is a valid vote, and if nobody "wins" with better than 55% of ballots marked the seat goes unfilled.)So again Carl, pray tell, how do you propose we all work together to make all that happen?
Try using the "Preview" button every 15 minutes or so. The "problem" magically goes away. You do proofread, right? That's how you do it. It's also a great way to catch formatting errors like the one that turned the previous post into almost 100% italics (which I fixed by the insertion of a single "/" character).I spent another 2 hours giving thorough answers to a number of other issues that arose, but because our website arbitrarily times out a contributor after they've been on one tropic for an hour, all of that work was LOST.