Say there is a state wide law that will make it legal to buy alcohol in grocery stores?
I support this law since I’m tired of making two stops to make my chili. Can I print out flyers talking about how great life will be if we pass the law or can I spend money on gas to drive to the opposite side of the state and stand on a street corner telling people how awesome life will be? Can I quit my job and live of my savings through October so I can spend 80 hrs per week telling people how awesome life with one stop chili will be?
Now this law also effects a company I own, let’s a a craft distillery, this will hurt small liquor stores who are currently my bread and butter and make it harder to grow my business. Can I have a poster in my tasting room discussing why the law is bad? How about my bartenders telling patrons that the law may cause the company problems? What if I donate product to an event that is educating people about how it will hurt local craft producers?
There is obviously no attempt to bribe anyone in the scenarios but in each I’m spending money either private or corporate to explain to people why they should vote a specific way how will you draw the line without crippling my ability to talk to people about my political opinions.
I’m not sure I’m following you. What do you mean by mention his name in a paid forum? I assume you’re thinking of paying for a TV add and saying vote for X. But what about something my distillery did two weeks ago; we sent out an email to our entire mailing list about Senate Amendment #3539 to the FAA bill tell them to contact their senators and tell the one sponsoring it good job and tell the other one to support it. Obviously we pay to email our mailing list and we obviously mentioned which one was supporting us and which one wasn’t. Was this mentioning their name in a paid forum? Did I bribe a senator?
I was talking about TV ads mainly. I don’t think your employer was bribing a senator at all, but there’s a point where someone could be campaigning for a senator that I’d consider off limits.
Now I don’t expect anything like my concept ever to happen, but if we didn’t allow so much money to flow to the candidates in the first place it would be a lot more obvious when the bribery was taking place.
OK, so it seems this is the correct crux of the argument. You believe that there is some amount of campaigning that translations from support to bribery. This obviously isn’t a problem with supporting laws so it’s only campainging for people.
Would you consider it bribery if I decided that we should lower the drinking age and launched a massive ad campaign. Let’s say that my campaign is successful and here in a month Pete Coors decides to run for governor again but this time bases his entire campaign around lowering the drinking age. Am I bribing the potential governor?
The problem I run into is you’re going to have to split the hair eventually between supporting a person and supporting their ideas. If the Kochs never advertised for a given candidate but instead spent all of their money convincing people that their ideas were the correct ones and then a set of politicians just raised their hands and said I support those great ideas I don’t think you’ve accomplished anything. If you try to prevent people from convincing others that their ideas are correct I don’t see how you can not run smack into the first ammenment.
Sure, you are not ending the influence of money in politics. It’s about making it easier to spot, and actually doing something about it when it is a bribe. If you communicate with Pete Coors in some way, any way, and as a result know that he is running for governor as a result, information not available to the public at the time, then you are attempting to influence him through your money. If you don’t have insider info about his plans you can go ahead and run your campaign about lowering the drinking age, as long as you aren’t mentioning Pete.
I don’t have a problem with what we know the Kochs do. Ok, I have a problem with what they are saying, but not with them saying it. The problem is we don’t know about all the money they are directing to politicians through dark contributions.
Sigh. I see that 90% of the posts here are worrying about what the politicians are worrying about. It’s what the politicians like that we should be worried about, not what annoys them.
Nice ploy. Pretty hard for me to be against “people getting together to influence laws”. :rolleyes:
But how would you feel if, let’s say hypothetically, those “people” were no ordinary people “getting together” in any ordinary way, but were all exclusively billionaires with entirely self serving objectives, all in a uniquely powerful position to use extraordinary means to promote their views through distortion and stealth in every nook and cranny of public discourse with absolutely zero accountability? And how about if everything they were promoting and largely succeeding in enacting into law were policies that directly conflicted with your own interests and the larger interests of society and which you vehemently disagreed with? But because you yourself are not a billionaire, you had virtually no ability to engage in this distorted and corrupted discourse. How would you feel then? Still so magnanimous about the awesome concept of “people getting together to influence laws”? Or would you perhaps recognize that that’s not what this is at all.
Try to answer credibly. Perhaps what is going on here is that you happen to agree with the ideologies that are being promoted by those most advantageously positioned to do these things, at the expense of actual democracy.
That’s what other countries do and what some states have tried to do, but that would remove the extraordinary leverage held by puddleglum’s friends like the Kochs.
You so much miss the point. To think that they are doing this for immediate personal gain reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the strategy of the Koch brothers and AFP. The Kochs and their mostly-secret billionaire donors are playing the long game. If they manage to get far-right politicians in power to benefit their bottom line through deregulation and tax cuts that’s basically a bonus, but what they really seek is a fundamental transformation of society, an almost Orwellian mission to institutionalize libertarian thought in every aspect of society that their tentacles can reach, from universities to social media to public broadcasting.
Actually, libertarian thought has already been institutionalized. The Constitution is a fundamentally libertarian document and the bias in the American system is towards liberty and skepticism of government. Liberals have been trying to change that, to institutionalize their beliefs and sideline “outdated” libertarianism. One key way to do that is to make the government the arbiter of who can speak on poiltical issues and under what circumstances.
What a load of revisionist crap. Libertarianism is entirely a construct of the wingnuttery of the latter half of the 20th century, and the interpretation of the Constitution as a libertarian document is entirely a construct of the fevered imaginations of the likes of the late Antonin Scalia and the brain-dead Clarence Thomas. It was Thomas Jefferson who said that “I hope we shall crush… in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” And that was long, long before the threat to the public interest of vast moneyed corporations and the super rich rose to anywhere near the magnitude it has today. The idea of libertarianism as social anarchy devoid of government and dominated by a reigning oligarchy is as recent and uniquely American as it is completely insane.
Sorry, but the liberal Supreme Courts began a reinterpretation of the Constitution away from its strongly libertarian ideals in the 1930s. Prior to that, it was hard for Congress to even impose minimum wage or child labor regulations.
There’s no question that money’s an advantage. If I can outspend the next guy 3 to 1, then that means I have more time to bark at voters about why my opponent’s a scumbag and I can also use more resources to mobilize voters. There’s no question it’s an advantage.
But an unpopular incumbent is an unpopular incumbent, regardless of money. And if a challenger can be attractive enough to court donors, then it won’t always matter how much more the other guy can raise. What’s necessary is to have enough to remain competitive.
I wonder if the Post’s article takes into account the number of times incumbents essentially run unopposed. One reason candidates are unopposed is that they’ve already raised enough money to scare off most competitors. That leaves room only for those who can raise real money. However, what we really mean is that it requires a real opposition. Challengers don’t raise money because donors aren’t going to toss money at someone unless they believe an incumbent is weak and the challenger is a real alternative.
It’s more complicated than what the article lays out.
You’ve obviously read the Constitution selectively and not the entire document, and you clearly don’t know the historical background behind the development of the document.
Such a move would necessarily come with massive campaign finance reform so that the Kochs of the world or special interests cannot, for example, run an anti-Hillary movie days before the election.
I will try to answer credibly. I will try to imagine billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg ally with a bunch of other tech moguls to try to change the laws of this country to keep their business costs down at the expense of workers. I will try to imagine them spending millions of dollars on ads to influence elections. Actually I don’t have to imagine that because it already happened. The result was a horrible defeat for the immigration bill and is the primary reason Marco Rubio lost his presidential bid and Trump is doing so well in his.
How about we imagine another billionaire such as Bloomberg getting together with a bunch of his friends to spend millions to curtail our constitutional right to bear arms. We don’t have to imagine that either his group “Everytown for Gun Safety” spent millions and endorsed over 100 candidates in 2014. Of course we know that 2014 was a landslide win for republicans and his group has accomplished nothing for gun control and has no prospects of accomplishing anything.
Billionaires can spend and plot all they want. What wins elections is votes.
Make it illegal for our elected and appointed officials to accept a dime from anyone.
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That’s almost impossible to do. There are too many ways money can change hands.
