Public Citizen Asks Candidates to Return Elections to Voters
August 23rd, 2010PublicCitizen is asking candidates around the country to stand with their constituents and demand that elections be returned to voters.
In January, the Supreme Court tossed out a hundred years of election laws and declared that corporations were free to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. The Court concluded that corporations have the same free speech rights as people, and thus the same freedom to participate in our electoral process.
The only way to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision is to amend the Constitution to put elections back in the hands of voters. We are asking every candidate for Congress to sign the Pledge to Protect America’s Democracy, and promise to work toward a Constitutional Amendment that will protect a government of, by and for the people.
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Tags: Public Citizen Asks Candidates to Return Elections to Voters, Supreme Court
August 24th, 2010 at 7:09 am
For years I have beleived we need to do away with electorial votes and return elections to the voters. The biggest problem I see is getting people to vote. Many are disapointed and beleive their vote does not count. Approximately 15% of the people vote.
August 24th, 2010 at 10:53 am
This is an astonishingly bad idea, cloaked in a noble purpose. Any change in the protections of the 1st Amendment would open a Pandora’s box of unforeseen consequences, and effectively constitutionalize different levels of free speech for different people.
Primarily, corporate money is spent to influence elections because the politicians chosen in those elections have so much largess at their disposal — government contracts, subsidies, tax breaks, etc. — that they can direct to favored corporations. Agribusiness and big oil leap instantly to mind.
Rather than toy around with freedom of speech, why not amend the Constitution to prohibit corporate subsidies, special tax breaks, and no-bid government contracts? If politicians could not loot the public treasury for the benefit of special interest friends, the latter would no longer care very much who holds elected office.
This would do two things that would be warm-and-fuzzy to both leftists and libertarians: (1) end corporate corruption of the politican process and (2) end the “corporate state” structure of the economy that is not market-based but purely politically-based.
August 24th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Bill: I take a bit of a different view on voting. Obviously we have a problem with voter turnout as low as it is, but a lot of those who don’t vote are educated, intelligent people who have become cynical with both parties and the system and simply “dropped out.”
A lot of the people who still vote do it as a duty, but do not spend the time to sift through enough information to make the intelligent choice.
If the hippie drop outs would come back, and the uneducated would stop voting for politicians who lie just to get their votes, I think we would all be better off : )
August 24th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Yana: You have still not addressed my “solution,” public financing of elections.
August 24th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Here’s the problem I have with public financing of elections: the rules of the game will be set by law, i.e., by elected politicians.
What have we got from them to date?
(1) In virtually every state, ballot access laws make it next to impossible for anyone other than Republicans and Democrats to appear on the general election ballots. Some states are more restrictive than others, but generally, it is a huge expenditure of time and money for third party and independent candidates to gain ballot access.
(2) Gerrymandering — named for Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts who pioneered the concept to ensure Federalist candidates victory back in the late 1700s. Most state legislative districts and practically all US congressional districts are gerrymandered, not so much to ensure minority representation as to guarantee incumbents safe seats. Result? Since 1980, on average 90% of incumbents running for re-election to Congress have won.
These two factors impel me to a profound distrust of giving more power over the election process to government, because that means giving it to politicians.
Public financing of elections, given their track record with ballot access and gerrymandering alone, would inevitably result in an even more corrupt system in which the average voter would have even less control and choice.
Like Prohibition, public financing of elections sounds like a wonderful idea. On paper, it is a wonderful idea. In the real world of US politics, it will turn out to be another boondoggle that elected politicians will somehow subvert and corrupt in their favor. I can easily see them tacking “proof of support” requirements onto receipt of public funds for campaigns that effectively eliminate anyone but Republicans and Democrats. They’ve done it already with ballot access. Why not public financing of campaigns?
What’s the alternative?
No limits on campaign contributions whatsoever, but an ironclad requirement that all donations be reported, by name and amount, in real time on a public Internet site.
That way, large donors will be instantly known, what politicians are receiving the money and how much will be instantly known, and the web press, including Locust Fork, can immediately call loud and boisterous attention to it.
Knowledge is power, particularly knowledge disseminated without external controls on its dissemination. The instant availability of the information through real-time reporting on a public web site, alone, will do much to change the political contribution situation.
Public financing would remove the control from donors — thousands of them, lest we forget, people who gave 5, 10 or 20 dollars to Obama on the Internet, and to similar efforts — and transfer it to politicians whose collective history of the last few decades is one of cynicism, demagoguery and looting of the public till, not to mention guarding self-interest to a degree that would make a medieval monarch blush.
One counter to this is that, well, the people will just have to be on guard to make sure it doesn’t happen. Oh, just like we made sure restrictive ballot access, lifetime congressional seats and other boondoggles didn’t happen. Once a power or prerogative gets into the hands of politicians, particularly one so close to home as elections, the only guarantee is corruption, subversion and theft.
My belief is the best way to promote clean elections is to make sure elected politicians have as little control over them as possible. Right now, the evidence is overwhelming that allowing them too much control results in subversion of the democratic process.
If Congress were an assembly of saints, it would be a different story. But it’s an assembly of people no better, and often worse, than the rest of us. More liberty in the political process, not less, is the answer. Public financing will mitigate toward less, and toward what Frank Herbert defines as the birth of a new aristocracy.
August 24th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
On your first point, law is the answer. We are a nation of laws, not men.
It’s getting the undue influence of the wrong people out of politics that is the problem.
The Supreme Court ruling overturned 100 years of established American law.
Now it is the Wild West, but after eight years of Bush-Cheney, THEY have ALL the MONEY!
We are not starting from scratch trying to build an new country.
The system is not even close to being FAIR now. Without laws, the world would never be fair. That’s what laws are made for. If we have bad laws, we can overturn them in the courts, and write new ones.
I happen to believe the law we had was better than nothing, which is where we are now. It was written at a time when slavery had been abolished and the Robber Barrens were exploiting labor with horrendous working hours and conditions and incredibly low pay, not even enough to feed or house themselves.
That’s the logical conclusion of the so-called “free market’s” promise.
To make it simple, without national, government regulation, you get run amok corporate capitalism, which we’ve had for the past few years and see where it got us on the Gulf Coast?
By far the worst environmental disaster in this nation’s history, due to bad Halliburton cement, a rush to drill the deep well without regard for environmental or safety rules, due to a confidence that no executive authority in the U.S. could really touch them.
Now we have private contractors deciding who sprays dispersants and when, without regard for government orders telling them to stop. THEY decide when to burn oil and methane from the surface, and THEY guard the beaches too, and when you mention the Obama administration’s policy and show them your press credential from the Coast Guard, they pay no heed and tell you you must have the proper PPE on to get on the beach.
Look at the news page links to stories on what Blackwater did in Iraq, with a slap on the wrist. Private armies, costing a thousand times more than the Army? Is that what you want?
No!
Did you miss the stories on what Target and Best Buy recently did? You said they wouldn’t, but watch this. And the so-called “liberal” network wouldn’t even run it?
MSNBC Refused to Air This MoveOn.Org Ad
http://blog.locustfork.net/tag/target-aint-people-msnbc-refused-to-air-this-moveon-org-ad/
August 25th, 2010 at 11:03 am
All good points, but the “nation of laws” tact avoids the obvious fact that the folks who make those laws — from the ones that restrict ballot access and gerrymander to the ones that give large corporations special status and favors — are those same corruptible politicians who constitute the problem.
Yes, after eight years of Bush-Cheney their buddy corporate bedfellows have a lot of the money. But not all of it.
Viz: Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the three richest individuals in the world, who are funding a lot of things other than rightwing PACs and the GOP. There are other examples of wealthy folks who fund left-of-center political advocacies, like George Soros. It’s not a monolithic situation.
Viz: Again, the huge fundraising success of the Obama campaign, showing that with the Internet it is possible not only to democratize information but also democratize fundraising, successfully.
As for the Supreme Court decision overturning 100 years of “established American law” (I am not sure what event that 100 years signifies, but let’s go with it for the sake of argument), the Supreme Court has done that before in decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and others. How long something has been “settled law” is trumped, under the US constitutional system, by a new defintive ruling by the Supreme Court. That is the basic, fundamental law; if we want to change that (because we may not be pleased with a particular Court decision), then the option open is amending the Constitution.
All of the evils mentioned in relation to BP, and presumably other corporations licensed to do a certain amount of evil by the EPA, are a direct result of replacement of common law tort with administrative law. The former is ultrademocratic, the latter is quasiauthoritarian.
By extension, progressives seem hysterical that the Supreme Court ruling will somehow allow all the evil corporations to influence elections even more and get away with even more evil than is currently the case. In order to prevent this, they propose to restrict 1st Amendment rights.
In the first place, there is no guarantee that American voters will suddenly become far right in their majority just because BP and Halliburton are buying ads that tell them to do so and elect Bush-Cheney clones to office. That presumes American voters, who elected Barack Obama, have absolutely no minds whatsover and will flock to vote for whoever big business backs.
As shown by MSNBC’s refusal to take a MoveOn.org ad recently, media outlets have the option of refusing advocacy advertising if they like. (They cannot refuse candidates for federal office, but that is the only compulsion they are under regarding ads.) As also mentioned, big corporations that have lots of stockholders, including state and other institutional pension funds, have many more considerations to take into account when spending tens of millions of dollars than what a few rich Republicans would like them to do.
Bottom line, the Supreme Court ruling is not the end of the world and, if anything, will force left-of-center political folks to get serious about fundraising themselves. As a longtime veteran of nonprofit fundraising, my expert analysis of left-of-center political fundraising is that it lags 15 to 20 years behind the sophistication of those on the right. The devil did not do this to them, and Jesus won’t rescue them. They need to figure it out for themselves, and they will.
And they will be able to do that in an environment freed of much of the restriction that existed before the Supreme Court ruling. In a few years, we’ll be hearing, from left-of-center, how that ruling turned out not so bad after all.
August 25th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
MSNBC didn’t refuse the BP ads, or the drug company ads.
I’ll be you a 12-pack of Yuengling we will never hear that this came out “not so bad after all.”
It’s the middle of the beginning of the end, my friend.
You will see.
I ain’t been wrong yet, except once, when I predicted Wallace would die within three weeks of leaving politics like Bear Bryant died three weeks after retiring from football. Wallace lived with the pain for another 12 years…