Many of you have probably heard Barb Sundin talk about ideas for campaign reform. She's been handing a list of ideas to candidates for office and I thought you might like to read them too. (My favorite is #5.)
Campaign Reform Wish List
by Barbara Sundin
In light of the recent Supreme Court decision it becomes clearer that what we need is serious campaign finance reform. Last year alone 2.7 billion dollars were spent on state and local elections and 6.3 billion were spent on federal elections.That’s BILLION. Can you imagine what we could do with that money? Fix our schools, provide healthcare for everyone, fix our roads, invest in green energy are a few I can think of.
Following is a list of the things I would like to see in Campaign reform legislation. I know it’s a stretch, but if only some of these things get passed into law our elections might become sane again and legislators might just be able to legislate for the good of the country, instead of fundraise. Furthermore, they would be responsible to the voters not the big money people and special interest groups. Please carefully consider these suggestions. They would make your life a lot easier and bring government back to the people.
1. Campaigns limited to 2 months before primary and then start up again on Sept 1
2. National Primary day in May
3. No money can be raised until the campaign season starts 2 months before the primary.
4.No contributions from corporations or lobbyists or unions or special interest groups
5. No contributions from anyone who can’t vote for you. (Makes legislators more responsive to their constituents.)
6. All TV time free to candidates for the month of October and until the election in November.
7. All money left in the war chest at the end of the campaign goes into a general fund that can be evenly distributed to candidates who are running the next time.
The idea in all of this is to limit the time and money spent on campaigning. It should never be that the election goes to the highest bidder.Furthermore, legislators shouldn’t have to spend all of their time in office trying to raise money to run the next time. They should be legislating.
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2 comments:
I should add this note related to #5 above: On occasion I give money to politicians that I can't vote for. That doesn't make me a hypocrite. If they pass a law against it, I'll be happy to abide by it. But not before then.
I meant to comment on this a long time ago, and life just intervened on me.
I completely agree with Barbara's overall premise. There is no reason we should spend so much time focusing on elections, no reason our elected Congresspeople should spend so much time campaigning instead of doing their jobs, and no reason a person should have to spend millions of dollars to get a job that pays (at best) a 6-figure salary. It doesn't make sense.
I think the key is to divide a list like this into things that are logistically easy to do (but we've just lacked the political will to do them) vs. things that are difficult to do practically. I don't know what we do about the latter category. My comments on the specific items would be:
#1 - I agree with the idea, but how could this be carried out/enforced? I could see banning "campaign events" or ads, but where do you draw the line? No public statements of any kind?
#2 - Yes. Our primary system is incomprehensible and undemocratic. We were *lucky* in PA in 2008 that we may actually have had some say in how the Democratic primary turned out. Didn't really happen in '04, did it?
#3 - Same as #1. I agree, but what's to stop someone from schmoozing and lining up donors ahead of time and then getting them to write their checks on Day T-minus-60?
#4 - Agreed, though this is full of loopholes. Obama's campaign actually returned donations from people they could identify as *registered* lobbyists. But if the boss rounds up a lot of employees and 'encourages' them to donate, what's to stop that?
#5 - I'm with Loren. I like this idea, but I've donated to outside people before myself. Either to candidates in districts where I *used to live*, or just candidates I felt an affinity towards (Al Franken). I think what you're getting at, though, is that for example, a rich PPL executive who resides in western PA shouldn't be able to donate to every central PA candidate who might act favorably towards PPL. I'm all in favor of that philosophy.
#6 - I don't know if I'd go as far as "all TV time free" but clearly TV is a huge reason campaigns have become so expensive. Forcing the FCC-regulated networks to provide equal, free, primetime coverage to candidates would clearly help. Millions of dollars for 30-second spots that usually attack and rarely tell us anything? And this is what donations to candidates probably pays for? Why don't we just flush that money down the toilet?
#7 - This is an interesting idea, but I wonder if we'd see the same effect as with "use it or lose it" Flexible Health Savings Accounts where people end up buying a bunch of unnecessary eyeglasses & Tylenol at the end of the year to use up their money. Each campaign might turn into Brewster's Millions by the end. But maybe that's not a net loss.
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