You mean you got a speeding ticket or some other minor infraction and the officer asked you to post bond on the spot? It’s one of the state’s quirks, but it’s completely legitimate-- the $40 doesn’t go into the officer’s pocket. It makes sense especially with the speeding tickets since we get tons of out-of-state traffic and the fines are too low to bother trying to track someone down. Making them pay on the spot is the best way to assure they’ll actually pay their fine.
Not to start an extensive side debate, but the “citizen legislator” model usually creates far more problems than it solves. The work of drafting and considering laws even in a small state is simply too complicated for one person, and if you only serve for a term or two you really can’t really get a good staff recruited and retained. A lot of the citizen legislature states also pay their legislators virtually nothing, which doesn’t help either. This creates two problematic results: laws get written without oversight from anyone with any real legal training and many just plain sloppy laws get passed that either get overturned by the courts or are unworkable in actual legal practice. More importantly though, amateur legislators without good permanent staffs rely far more heavily on lobbyists to do the lion’s share of research and often even the actual drafting of laws. The ideal is that citizen legislators should be less susceptible to undue influence, but in reality it’s usually worse.
The reality is that a lot of legislators are lawyers. Drafting legislation ain’t that damn hard. I’ve been a part of a group that did that…and the ink was still damp* on my license while I did it.
*Mild exaggeration. I’d been practicing for about a year at the time.
You should probably represent Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman:
Maybe you can visit the former governor in prison, pat him on the back and tell him he’s not really in jail for taking a bribe, since according to you, he did no such thing.
Since there was an explicit quid pro quo - contribution in return for a political appointment - according to Bricker, that was a bribe.
And relevant to my last cite:
This means that the Supreme Court allowed to stand the verdict in this case that a campaign contribution is a bribe if a politician agrees to do something in return and even if the politician did not directly get the money (i.e. a campaign contribution, which was the case here.)
So according to Bricker, “I will make sure you get elected by making massive campaign contributions and then you will always vote my way” is not a bribe. But “I will make massive campaign contributions to your pet causes if you give me special treatment” is not.
So a campaign contribution is a bribe… Unless it’s not a bribe. Gotcha.
As my first citation says:
Emphasis, mine.
Even if this laughable inconsistancy can be peddled with a straight face, the fact is that this sure would give the average person the “appearance of corruption.”
It’s not so much that it requires any particular expertise, it’s just that there’s far too much work to do during a short legislative session. A single person can’t even skim all the the bills that come up, let alone read them over carefully to make sure they fully understand all the implications. You don’t need a bunch of Clarence Darrows, but you need a staff of people you trust with at least some sort of legal training (young lawyers or even law students or poli sci people will do just fine) to give everything a look over, otherwise you’re just taking the draftor’s word that the law says what they say it does and that every little provision is drafted in a way that makes sense. This is basically the way a citizen legislature works-- an individual legislator has his/her pet bills that they scrutinize (including the ones they propose), but for most of the bills they have to trust their fellow legislators and the lobbyists to give them accurate information.
Most of the citizen legislatures work just fine and they have some advantages over professional legislatures, but one of their drawbacks is that they depend a lot more on outside parties than one where you have professional legislators presiding over staffs that can give each individual bill adequate attention and research.
If a single person cannot read the bills that come up, that means that there are too many bills. Not everything in the world needs to be legislated, and not everything in the world has to be re-legislated.
Unfortunately, there’s not really any getting around that with all the services people expect government to provide these days. During the 90 day session the legislature in my state holds every other year they barely have time to pass a budget to keep existing state business going-- they have very little time to actually revise and create laws. And 90 days is really pushing it for someone who has a farm or a business or a law practice to run.
Yeah, I agree. You may be missing the point of my post: I’m saying that, because we’re not in a perfect world, of course political contributions corrupt the process. I think we need to get away from political contributions entirely. Speech is free, but paying for speech is not the same thing as speaking.
This betrays an ignorance of the process. No one person needs to read the text of every bill. Reading the abstract is enough for most members.
Most of a bill is technical data. You don’t have to read the whole bill any more than you need to read the SDMB html to understand the message board.
Of course. Then they find out what’s in the bill after they pass it.
That’s not what I said. Is there some reason you’re making nonsense statements?
Ah, I understand actually, you’re using the moronic conservative meme that suggests that Pilosi said that congress didn’t know what was in the bill.
That’s not what she said, but why should you stick to facts and intelligent discourse when you can whip out a bumpersticker with misinformation on it?
So tell me, as a conservative, are you okay if people side with you because they believe things that aren’t true?
Since once in a while there are stories that pop up where the congressmen are surprised about some provisions of the Obamacare bill and once already (or was it twice?) they had to legislate a fix for the provision that they apparently didn’t know was in the bill, it is pretty clear that they voted for a bill they didn’t read or comprehend fully.
Nope, he’s out of luck, as I carefully explained.
That is different than a generalized campaign contribution in the expectation that the candidate will vote for things you favor. Siegelman’s conviction was because he agreed to perform a specific task, not because his contributor gave the contribution with a generalized expectation of currying favor with Siegelman.
It’s quite mysterious to me how you could believe that Siegelman’s conviction stood in contradiction to what I said, because your link specifically says he was convicted for taking a $500,000 contribution in exchange for appointing him to a state hospital planning board.
And my post specifically said that the act becomes prosecutable if the benefit is given to the candidate, rather than his campaign, or if the contribution is an explicit quid-pro-quo for action on a specific piece of legislation.
Did you deliberately ignore that?
Did you not understand it?
Misuse of quotation marks.
Here’s the actual line I responded to:
I see that you added the word “always” in your version of what I said:
Did you decline to use the VBB quote function because you knew that you could change my quote inside quotation marks without drawing a warning?
The word makes a huge difference. The first – “vote my way” – is nothing but a generalized expectation of future actions consistent with the general views of the contributor. He’s allowed to contribute to a candidate who thinks as he does.
But the word always brings us from the general to the very specific. As the court explained:
(emphasis added)
Who cares what you think the average person would think? The question was whether it’s a bribe or not. That’s a matter of clearly defined criminal law, I answered correctly, and you apparently cannot comprehend the fact.
In any event, this has nothing to do with the Citizens United decision. Under these same facts, Siegelman would be convicted today, with Citizens United in full force.
Santorum and Gingrich’s billionaires didn’t get them a puppet in the white house either but you don’t see the how that challenges the integrity and public confidence in our democratic process? Does the billionaire have to win for that kind of money to undermine public confidence in our democracy?
Just because you have drawn clear distinctions in your mind about the difference between giving a million dollars to your candidate to run attack ads against his opponent and running those attack ads yourself doesn’t mean that the distinction is clear.
I suspect that candidates will start selling space on their suits like nascar drivers.
Yeah, but its not necessary to create the appearance of impropriety.
There is no voter fraud problem but we have to fix the problem. There is actualyl a problem with the influence of mopney in politics but thats OK.
When you’re running ads - whether attack ads or not - it’s YOUR political expression. Clearly. No ands ifs or buts. Prohibiting it is abridging speech.
Why is a billionaire entitled to more political expression than a working Joe?