I suspect this has been covered before. Is there a consensus about a way to get rid of the situation where most office holders above dog catcher have to spend substantial amounts of their time raising money for campaigns? Then are beholden to the donors?
Once you are elected to the House or Senate, you generally have to retire to get replaced, at least in any particular election, you are almost guaranteed a win, no matter the issues or money raised. Is that a correct statement?
If money were ‘outlawed’, only publicly funded debates and Q&A sessions allowed? Get enough signatures, you are on the stage?
Wouldn’t term limits, say, 4 years for the House, 12 for the Senate…wouldn’t that take some of the money out? Probably not, so long as anyone is running and needs money to run ads.
Seriously. How could the present stupid system be fixed?
Highlighted the key word right there. It allows rich people and rich corporations to push their own arguments virtually without limit, while those of more modest means are drowned out.
Such a huge discrepancy in influence is not beneficial to the health of a democracy. There may be no way to completely eliminate such an advantage, but that doesn’t mean we should enshrine it as an acceptable part of the democratic process.
I doubt if ads — which are inherently ridiculous, yet more for reinforcement of views than persuasive — are the problem. Anytime, anywhere, there’s any election, big sums have to be spent.
Staff have to be paid; bills have to be paid; people have to be paid off; printers have to be paid; tv networks have to be paid; there need to be kick-backs to colleagues; taxes; police presences ( which interestingly enough have bills still being pursued by municipalities for the 2016 election; stamps and stationary/phone and broadband bills etc. etc… And many, many forms of donations to sweeten friends and voters.
Plus if Hillary disproved the fact that the winning side is the one that spends the most, her failure will not cause future parties to spend less.
It is a feature of Democracy, not a bug. In a Republic the strongest rules; in a Democracy the richest rules.
Many an old wiseacre sourly opined that giving votes to the poor would mean the poor would instantly take over the wealth of the rich. Never has happened; never will.
As the fine old English song goes:
It’s the Poor what gets the Blame, It’s the Rich what gets the Pleasure: Ain’t it all a Bleedin’ Shame.*
The section you quoted is a good example. How does a lack of money restrict the number of issues discussed or the depth of their exploration? You can express an idea quite easily and cheaply. Plenty of political ideas were being expressed in America before 1976.
It’s other issue where money matters: the size of the audience reached. Money doesn’t produce more ideas or better ideas. But it does determine which ideas are heard by five hundred people and which ideas are heard by fifty million people. Why should money be able to decide which ideas get heard and which don’t? Ideas should be able to compete on an equal basis. Which ideas get accepted should be based on whether the ideas are good or bad not on whether the ideas are supported by a lot of money.
The fact that so many people accept without question the idea that wealth should be allowed more speech shows the danger of allowing wealth to have more speech.
Note that this is a direct consequence of campaign finance restrictions. Limits on a single donor’s contribution mean that raising money requires more donors. If we were to go back to some version of the old system whereby a candidate’s campaign could be funded by a rich patron, the need to solicit donations goes away, and all the time spent on fund-raising can be devoted instead to legislative business.
People often recoil from the idea, but is it really that clear that we had a worse Congress before the campaign finance laws of 1974? (I think we had a worse Congress in many ways back then due to Jim Crow, but that seems orthogonal to campaign finance law). Would such a Congress today really be less responsive to the needs of the little people, particularly given how much of the billionaire contingent swings left?
There are definitely limits. Rich folks’ / corporations’ pockets may be deep, but they’re not “without limit”. And it strikes me as a particularly bizarre argument to make in the aftermath of the 2016 election, in which the chief complaint from the Left seems to have been that too many people got their news from free sources like Facebook friends / Twitter.
If you were unable to follow the Supreme Court’s logic, I doubt I can explain it any more clearly.
I don’t think anyone is claiming they weren’t.
I don’t subscribe to this ‘fairness’ philosophy - that all ideas ought to be given equal air time. If someone believes strongly in something, they ought to be free to use the resources they have available to them to advocate for it. If they can persuade others to pitch in their resources, they ought to be free to utilize them as well.
That’s not a common view. There have been a lot of complaints about the 2016 election but if I had to pick the chief one, I’d say it was the allegations that the Russian government interfered in the election and influenced the outcome in Trump’s favor.
Considering the resources Russia has, this doesn’t disprove the idea that money buys elections. The only surprise in 2016 was that the usual American billionaires got outbid.
Democracy can only be successful if every citizen has an equal opportunity to participate in politics. Everyone knows that huge amounts of private money corrupts our politics. The solution is public financing using a voucher system. Here’s how it would work.
For each Federal office, each adult citizen would be given a voucher worth a certain amount, for example $100. Each citizen would then be allowed to assign their voucher to the candidate of their choice, who could then redeem them for cash from whatever public authority is created for that purpose. Candidates may be allowed to raise a small amount of seed money from small contributions, a la Bernie Sanders’ $27.
Each candidate will be entitled to equal access to media coverage. How this could be arranged is open to question, but allowing billionaire owners of private media to peddle lies and distortions for or against any candidate must be prohibited.
This would be tough, as the upholders of the established order would scream “freedom of the press”. Of course, they own the presses.
I believe the Supreme Court’s answer was more-or-less that it did not need to be changed.
Not a candidate’s campaign, but sure, if you want to spend $100M advocating for the FairTax, or UBI, or whatever other pet issue you have, absolutely, go for it.
In my view, you’re at odds with the First Amendment here.
Would you be comfortable with Donald Trump’s administration determining which media companies were “peddling lies and distortions” and prohibiting them from doing so?
As a note - the city of Seattle is trying something like this this fall with two of the local races (City Attorney and City Council). It will be interesting to see how it works. (link)
The biggest hurdle to getting money out of politics are the politicians. They can’t get elected without the money so they’re not going to put an end to the money supply.
The law should be that elected and appointed officials of the US government can’t accept a dime from anyone outside of their salaries and any prior disclosed sources of revenue. That won’t solve every problem but it will improve the situation. The rules have to keep the politicians and their masters far enough apart that they can’t rely on each other.
Whatever happens I don’t want to see public financing. That will just make me pay part of the bill for the benefit of the super-rich overlords.
It really is a pure “free speech” issue. Are you allowed to advocate for a political idea, publicly? Any advocacy that is more than shouting on the street corner costs money. Does the Constitution allow the government to put limits on such advocacy? Or, if you will, “abridge” it?