As before, we seem to be going round and round here. I’ll drop out for a while, hoping someone else can clear this up for you, but I’ll keep reading this thread. It seems to me that I think what I’m saying is clear enough, and so do you, but we don;t seem to be hearing each other.
For the record, I got your points just fine. You just refused to see that my objections to your proposed plan were quite reasonable ones.
And still do.
But I’m curious if other principles in this discussion might not be able to get a clue as to what the other is saying. So far you and I (and Ravenman) seem to put the kibosh on this topic, for some curious reason, but I have faith that other folks will be able to have a great debate, or even a Great Debate, on the topic. We seem to be talented only at having a Really Frustrating Debate.
Perhaps you can address my question of why politicians should have no right of refusal to take campaign contributions from people or organizations they do not like. An anonymous donor system would eliminate the ability of politicians to do so.
Sure. If I have no idea that the KKK is contributing to my campaign, and so it’s impossible that I could be beholden to the KKK, what possible harm is there in accepting their money? I’m going to vote the way I want to, and any KKK moneys I receive that I put to uses contrary to KKK goals (i.e., every penny) give them zero access or influence on me.
Karl Rove has just announced the opening of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Republican Campaign Contribution Clearing House.
The RRMRCCCH provides guaranteed transmittal of your campaign contribution to the US Gov’t Clearing House for the Republican candidate of your choice. For a mere $10 processing charge, you receive a certified document detailing the exact amount of your contribution and the Republican candidate it went to. We are audited by all four of the Big Four auditors, so you (and the candidate) can be sure the contribution is valid. We are not associated in any way with any campaigns, and do not make any donations of our own, we are truly just a processer of YOUR Republican donation.
Don’t be hampered by some hippie’s attempt to prevent you from influencing the Republican candidate of your choice, call the RRMRCCCH today!
I don’t get it Cheesesteak. Under pseudo’s rules such a group/practice would obviously be outlawed.
Why would it be illegal? They’re just forwarding your check to the official clearing house for you, and providing you with proof they did it. It’s a simple service, write a letter on your behalf, mail it with your check to the clearing house, send you confirmation. I can’t hire someone to write letters and mail stuff for me?
Anyway, contributions are “anonymous” so you can’t prove that this company sent anything at all.
I think we could specify that funds must be donated directly from the donor to the Commission without a middleman. Any organization that fronts for donors would be have its checks returned, and any organization that repeatedly tries to act in such a way will have its officers arrested for violating the new campaign laws. I don’t think you wll see too much of this
It’s fairly amazing to me that people are so hostile to this idea that they’re twisting themselves into pretzels devising ways to get around it that could be easily accounted for in the new statute.
What would be illegal about it under pseudo’s rules? The RRMRCCCH is giving the money to the Commission, and giving anonymously. If the RRMRCCCH wants to list who’s donating money to them, what’s illegal about that?
Ah, I see.
I guess it would be made illegal because it’s a transparent attempt to get around the new rules.
I’m sure there are ways to game the system as it has been proposed so far, yours is one of those ways. But that doesn’t make the system a bad idea in principle does it? You just need to build in safeguards to the various methods of attack as they come to light.
My first thought on how to protect the system from your attack would be to make it possible for the donor (only, no proxies of any kind) to take the donation back up to a few months later by applying direct to the agency running the show. You could also introduce a variable delay between the cash getting into the official clearing fund and being paid out to the politicians’ campaign funds. The payments would also be lumped together into varying random amounts.
Your certificate from RRMRCCCH is now not such good proof to the politician in question that he has or will receive any cash from you.
I’m not an american so this is just an intellectual exercise for me, but it’s an interesting one to be sure. Here in the UK we have our own issues with political financing.
Nobody is fronting for anyone, they’re processing a document for a fee. I take your check, write a letter asking for the check to be applied to candidate X, per your instructions, and mail the letter with the check to the clearing house. There’s no difference between that and a rich guy asking his personal secretary to do the exact same thing, except anyone can use it, and get proof the document was processed. The RRMRCCCH need not deposit the contributors check, nor will their name be on the check, or any other document sent to the US clearing house.
There’s a reason people here are going the pretzel route. There will be a demand for this to be non-anonymous, and people WILL try and find a way to game the system. You seem to think that everyone will just sigh and meekly go along with the new way of contributing. I’m not personally hostile to the idea, but I’m willing to recognize that people who are intimately involved with this stuff today are going to be hostile and will use great imagination in getting around these rules that handcuff them.
If this sort of thing gets instituted, it will be a constant battle between the rules and the guys gaming the rules. Usually, the rules are a few steps behind the gamers.
Actually, there are already campaign finance laws that relate to bundling of campaign contributions. I am fairly sure that RRMRCCCH’s activities would not be legal under current laws, because that type of bundling is a vehicle for disguising the source of the contributions. (Which is actually the debate at hand, innit?)
Sorry, I misspoke. Bundling is a controversial tactic, but not yet illegal. It is a high priority for those who wish to push campaign finance reform, such as the Russ Feingold types, for the same reasons stated.
And if enough people are hostile to the idea, it won’t be a statute at all. It’ll just be a lame idea on a message board.
Look, what’s the purpose of making campaign contributions anonymous. So that lawmakers won’t know the identity of their big contributors, and therefore be inclined to do special favors for them.
The whole point of the pretzel-twisting is to show that anonymity can only succeed if the anonymous party wants it to succeed. And in this case, the contributor has no interest in remaining anonymous, and the lawmaker has no interest not knowing the identity of his backers.
What’s to stop someone from calling a press conference, writing a million dollar check to Senator Bedfellow on camera, and dropping the check in the mail? What’s to stop the lobbyist from visiting Senator Bedfellow, writing out the check and dropping it in the mail while Senator Bedfellow (or one of his trusted staffers) watches?
Of course the little guys who give $100 to their favorite politician’s re-election campaign aren’t going to bother de-anonymizing their contributions. But the big contributors, the very ones whose large contributions get them access today, would have a reason to break anonymity. And so we have a system where unproblematic contributions are anonymous, while the problematic ones aren’t, because there are 5000 dead easy ways to break it.
The proposal is worse than useless, because not only does it NOT keep problematic contributions anonymous, it keeps problematic contributions secret from the public! Now Senator Bedfellow knows that his main backers are the Bavarian Illuminati, but the public doesn’t. This proposal would be a lobbyist’s wet dream, since now they can contribute all they want without that pesky public scrutiny.