Commonality of the Political Spectrum?

septimus · September 16, 2018, 5:30pm

I like Mr. Innuendo’s entire post, but have highlighted an important key. Congress is dominated by campaign finance. It is said that even the honest Congresscritters need to spend way too much of their time soliciting donations throughout their term, not just in election season.

It may not be clear how best to reduce the influence of money, but many thought that the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (“McCain–Feingold Act”) was an intelligent approach that had some merit. Unfortunately this was struck down in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) by a 5-4 vote.

Perhaps the Democrats are trying to run on the issue of campaign finance reform:

As the midterms approach, Democrats appear to be coalescing around an anti-corruption message.

Today, Democrats are promising a small-donor campaign finance matching system, as the third and most transformative plank of Democrats’ Better Deal for Democracy program, developed by Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes.
… In the proposal, Democrats are committing to a small-donor matching system that would transform how campaigns are financed, by creating a six-to-one public match for every dollar raised in small-dollar contributions. Rather than spending their time calling rich people and attending fundraisers on K Street, individual members would have a greater incentive to do fundraising events back in their districts. As a result, they’d get a very different sense of the most important problems facing the country.

Rep. Sarbanes is right that the Democrats can’t just casually message on this. They have to commit. As he put it, “This reform message is not something you just wear for the evening, this is something you own.”

The road to reform is challenging. But momentum is slowly building. There is now, for the first time in more than a decade, a real chance that good politics and good policy can actually come together in democracy reform. This is significant.

Too optimistic? Perhaps. But we must hope for something, lest we start thinking that solutions involving explosives are not entirely unreasonable.