I support this bill because it is a step in the right direction. The bill is not perfect, not that any bill is, but it is important. I have read it and went to the committee hearing in DC in July for this bill. As I understand it, if you can get the minimum required signatures you will be eligible for funding. If your opponent does not participate in the system, the system will fund you more to make it a fairer race. Plus, if I’m running under this system and my opponent isn’t, it gives me something to bring up in debates/ads. I can say hey look I’m here working for the people while my opponent is working for these special interests. True or not, you could bring that up. That is how political ads work anyway.

I disagree that the only purpose of government is to protect the people’s liberties. I also disagree that only the “vast majority of power” belongs to the people. I would say that all the power belongs to the people, and that government is (or should be) the people’s tool to wield power for democratically directed goals.

I don’t want power to be wielded solely by individuals who have no obligation to consider what effects their actions may have on others. Being subjected to the power of others, without having the ability to seek redress for any wrongs, is authoritarian; it’s the definition of the law of the jungle.

Besides securing basic liberties, government must allow the people to manage society democratically. If government becomes a power unto itself, it will manage society dictatorially. But if properly democratic, it’s far better than the capriciousness of 300 million individual authoritarian powers.

But I’m a socialist, you’re a libertarian, so we argue. C’est la vie.

Well, Article I, Section IV says:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and
Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof;
but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except
as to the Place of Choosing Senators.”

The question then becomes how do you define the “Manner.” It’s an unfortunately vague word.

I would like to see some actual comments as to why so many people support this bill. From what I understand this “Fair Election System” would be optional. In some cases a candidate would be better off not opting into this system. If all candidates did opt into this system, the matching payments would increase the disparity between them, not reduce it. Also, the language in this bill does not guarantee matching funds to all willing participants (i.e. third parties) and the requirements for qualification could be hard to meet by even Republicans and Democrats.

I think people support this because everyone is worried that Congress pays more attention to its big donors than to the voters. The left and right are worried about different deep pockets buying up the government, and that fear is not unfounded. If the system were mandatory, its supporters would probably like it even more. (I would.)

The things you mention—the disparity caused by matching funds, the potential for 3rd parties to lose on funds—are all better options than having a corporation or other group with a billion dollars campaigning against your preferred candidate. At least this way candidates get money by making it onto the ballot and getting people to trust them enough hand over $50. If a candidate earns twice as much money as their opponent and gets a boost from the matching funds, then perhaps they earned it. Or perhaps they’re just better at BS, but it beats having them pick up $5 million in a backroom deal.

This way they come back to the people for more money.

I personally find this bill unfair. Unless I have read it incorrectly, it seems to favor those that are in office and not the competition. It is currently hard enough for a new candidate to replace an entrenched congressmen, let alone when congress spends government money without having to campaign as much. This bill tips an already skewed scale in my opinion, and I am not in favor.

If a candidate opts into this system are they automatically less corrupt? If a candidate can raise the same amount of money with fewer donations does that make their corruption easier to detect? We blame the politicians for taking so much corporate money and favoring their needs over the people’s needs, yet we still vote them back into power.

Why mess with these paltry compromises? We can just have someone take our money, give it to the best candidates, and have them campaign to an independent commission that will do all of our research and vote for us.

The problem with your argument is that your point of view on political ads and the FCC have not been supported by the Supreme Court. The FCC has existed for 70 years, and in that time the Court has neither dissolved it nor prohibited it from enforcing decency standards. Now you may have problems with the FCC and its policies—I have some problems with the FCC and its policies—but determinations of constitutionality are not up to you or me. They’re up to the Supreme Court.

Now you may not like the fact that judicial review is not explicitly granted to the Supreme Court in the Constitution, or that the Court basically just gave itself the power in 1803, but by the accepted interpretation of the Constitution it’s legal, and decisions of constitutionality are the Court’s. Your strict constructionalist view can and should affect your support for any proposed laws, but you can’t insist it’s the only legal viewpoint. 200 years of history have said otherwise.

The Federalists worried that the Articles of Confederation was too weak, that the US would be torn apart through civil war (Shays’ Rebellion was often cited), and that individual states lacked the power or respect to keep the US safe from attack or foreign influence. They also worried about the lack of central authority over the states. In the Federalist #21 Hamilton wrote, “The United States, as now composed, have no powers to exact obedience, or punish disobedience to their resolutions…”

The Constitution changed this with a powerful central government. Anti-Federalists feared the powers of the new government, so the Bill of Rights was drafted as a compromise. The fact that the Bill of Rights was seen as necessary should be plenty of evidence for how powerful the founders intended the federal government to be. At the time they saw the Constitution as being so strong that, unless it was restricted from abolishing even basic rights and due process, it had the power to do so.

“Political advertisements and other communications related to the election are not part of the election itself.”

Aren’t they? I would say that candidates informing the voters about their positions, and about how these positions differ from those of the other candidates, seems like a vitally important part of an election.

While I agree that having a uniform method of tallying and counting votes is definitely an aspect of the “manner” of holding elections, so are the rules for how one gets onto the ballot, and the restrictions for where and when a candidate can campaign. Why rules regulating or providing campaign funds should be any different, I can’t imagine. The Constitution says nothing about paying poll workers; the federal and state governments passed laws to organize that as part of their regulation of the manner of elections. Same principle.

Do you know where your Congressman is?

Would you let your secretary just wander out the door when ever she wanted and without any explanation as to where she was going or when she was going to be back?

The major defect I see is that candidates have a choice to opt out of this system of campaign finance.

I would disagree that the only purpose of government is to protect the people’s liberties. I also disagree that only the “vast majority of power” belongs to the people. I would say that all the power belongs to the people, and that government is (or should be) the people’s tool to wield power for democratically directed goals.

I don’t want power to be wielded solely by individuals who have no obligation to consider what effects their actions may have on others. Being subjected to the power of others, without having the ability to seek redress for any wrongs, is authoritarian; it’s the definition of the law of the jungle.

Besides securing basic liberties, government must allow the people to manage society democratically. If government becomes a power unto itself, it will manage society dictatorially. But if properly democratic, it’s far better than the capriciousness of 300 million individual authoritarian powers.

But I’m a socialist, you’re a libertarian, so we argue. C’est la vie.

I would say that the primary limits on government the Constitution’s authors were concerned with involved preventing any individual or group from taking over the government. (Also, the states wanted to maintain some autonomy and keep themselves from being railroaded by other states.) You’re also right that they were looking at the English monarchy as the model for what not to do in government. That’s what is meant by “limited government.”

Remember that from the start, the Constitution’s authors knew that they would be the ones running the government. They wanted to ensure that whichever branch they ended up in, they would have power with regard to the other 2, and that a future rival wouldn’t one day become emperor and start cutting off heads.

Our “limited government” is designed to protect republican institutions and balance power between the branches to stave of dictatorship. The idea that it means government can’t regulate the public or business is nonsense.

This bill gets nothing done except to give the government a little more financial and regulatory control over how elections are conducted. I agree that the corruption of elections by corporations and special interest needs to be remedied. I can’t support this bill, however, because it doesn’t propose a real solution. If you want to truely even the playing field, than you a)need to make this system mandatory; b)completely rule out private contribution to specific campaigns by either making all private contribution go into the same “Fund” pot, or completely eliminating private contribution totally by making it illegal, and actually enforcing it (a thing our gov’t seems unable to do in many cases).

For me, its not enough to go a step in the right direction, because it does nothing but give the government added control without accomplishing the objective of making elections more fair. Again, I agree with the notion, but can’t support this method of accomplishing it.

Beware of any bill with the word “fair” in the title — more often than not it will be anything but. I oppose this bill on general principle. I don’t think public money of any kind should be used to fund anyone’s campaign.

Where does the federal government derive any authority to be involved in the funding of political campaigns at all? This is not a power enumerated in the Constitution. We shouldn’t even be having this discussion.

You may perhaps think bills like this are a ‘good idea’, but that really doesn’t enter into it. The federal government is restricted to its enumerated powers; anything else is not legal (and yes — this means at least 2/3 of what the government is doing is illegal). If you wish to regulate campaign finances then attempt to pass such a bill at the state level.

I should have said ‘regulate or provide for a publicly funded alternative to private sector funding’ instead of just ‘regulate’.

“…but it beats having them pick up $5 million in a backroom deal.”

I think we should instead work on prosecuting the recipients of this sort of bribery.

I have to wonder what the founding fathers would think about the lobbyists in Washington. Did you know that the only reason that Congressmen were ever paid a salary was so that poor people could serve if elected? The positions occupied by the Senators and Represenatives were supposed to be positions of honor and were to be undertaken as a service to our country. Why should these people receive any more money that those people that risk their lives everyday in the Armed Forces?
I don’t know about you, but I am fed up. I believe that campaign contributions should only come from individuals and be limited to $5000. end of story. The Senators, Representatives and Justices should be reminded that they are on OUR PAYROLL! I like Obama’s idea to publish information about who is meeting with who in Washington. If you own your own business don’t you keep tabs on your employees?

More than 20 years ago, President Carter warned that the flow of money into washington and the resulting influence of special interests would destroy our democracy. I believe it has already happened.

I hope I live to see the day when Congress is eliminated completely and every vote is a direct vote from the PEOPLE of the United States. I think at least there should be a very LARGE visual at each senators desk showing how the people he is supposedly respesenting would vote. I think this might be a lot harder to ignore when our PUBLIC SERVANTS are voting on bills before congress. We have the technology to do this. If I can pay my credit card bill on line, from funds from my checking account why the hell can’t I use my computer to cast a vote?

Now is the time for our Public Servants to be held more accountable for their actions. I want to know where they are, and who they are meeting with and what money is changing hands.

The problem we have is individuals with lots of capital paying politicians to use government to benefit them and skew the playing field. If the government is not able to do so in the first place, you’ve eliminated much of the problem. Likely there would still be some way of skewing the system, of course, but at this point perhaps the courts could actually be given a chance to work. Justice would be on a much better footing with a less corruptible system.

Whoops, this is supposed to be part 2 of a response to spender down there.

Laws capping political donations don’t violate the 1st amendment any more than the FCC does. The government is fully able to regulate the manner in which people communicate, provided that it doesn’t regulate the content of the communications (and even that isn’t absolute) or prevent communication from happening.

If the $100 cap were to apply to only Democrats and Republicans, and the law were to mandate a $50 cap on donations to all other parties’ candidates, that would violate the 1st amendment. But a straight $100 donation cap would not.

Also, the Constitution was NOT designed to limit the scope of the federal government. It CREATED the federal government out of a decentralized confederacy. It was written by people who looked at the states’ power in the US confederacy and concluded that this country needed centralized authority strong enough to compel the states obedience. It was not a limit on governmental power, it was a deliberate and vast expansion of governmental power.

Both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists wanted a limited government, it was just a question of degree. The Anti-Federalists were a little less naive, however, and so we some of the amendments they proposed as part of the Bill of Rights. Apparently even that wasn’t enough

States have their own constitutions which apply, as I’ve already said. Is it far fetched to see an emphasis on federal issues in a site discussing the activities of the federal Congress?

All levels of government should be weakened to the point that they are only capable of performing their correct function: to protect the rights of individuals. The vast majority of power rightfully belongs in the hands of individuals; we own ourselves and the products of our time and energy. Our rights should only end where another’s begin and vice versa. This is not the ‘law of the jungle’; it is liberty!

Please listen to Lawrence Lessig at the following link:

http://www.fixcongressfirst.org/page/invite/chronicleIV?source=message&utm_source=message&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20100209

“I think we should instead work on prosecuting the recipients of this sort of bribery.”

That would be my preferred way of handling it too. But when every politician insists that the contributions they receive don’t affect their votes (even though the stats suggest that they do); and when everyone in a position to begin prosecutions is either an elected official, an appointed official chosen by an elected official, or a subordinate of one of the two; and when our entire government is stuck in this system of pleasing donors with votes so no one considers it bribery in the first place; prosecutions would be impossible.

Basically, like the best criminal conspiracies, this system is documented, public and legal. As such, we need a new way of doing things.

I support this bill but it should cover the senate also !! All of congress should have public money sufficient to cover radio and tv ads plus direct mail. This would get rid of the time they waste kissing corporate behind.

The ‘services’ of a bought Congressperson wouldn’t be quite as valuable on the ‘market’ if the federal government wasn’t akin to Cthulu with enormous tentacles slithering this way and that, interposing themselves in the private lives of every living (or dead?) citizen. How about we enforce Constitutional limits of power instead of new creative legislation to attempt (and likely fail) to right every wrong? A smaller and significantly less-powerful federal government (as originally intended) would offer far less opportunity for mayhem. A bought legislator in a weak government is just that.

“As such, we need a new way of doing things.”

So said the Bolsheviks. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.