There has got to be a constitutional way to prevent the primary job of our legislators from being phoning rich people to beg for money, and that is currently their primary job. If their is no constitutional way to fix this, the constitution is broken. Maybe we can make it illegal for office holders to privately solicit funds for campaigns or political action committees they control, in exactly the same way it is illegal for them to solicit bribes?
Also, even with Citizens United, there is a lot of speech regulation, in the course of determining what a non-profit is and isn’t allowed to advocate for.
Of course not, but the organization doesn’t inherit your rights either. If I say ‘the corporation can’t contribute to candidates’, that doesn’t curtail your individual right to contribute to candidates at all. You’ve lost nothing.
The Supreme Court upheld restrictions on corporate poltiical spending as recently as 2003. It’s not an unreasonable position.
Look, this is just silly. Your contribution to a campaign will be used by the campaign to promote a candidate and a policy agenda. Your contribution to a PAC will be used by the PAC to promote a candidate and a policy agenda. If the one is you expressing yourself, so is the other, in precisely the same way. If the one can be limited, so can the other.
These are hard questions! If only someone had given them some thought, and come up with a regulatory regime to answer them.
Sure, you could shorten the election season. Hold primaries three or four weeks before the general. Less time to campaign means fewer campaign expenses, which means less need to solicit funds.
Germany, for example, has a short election season and does not have our campaign finance issues despite the absence of any limits for political contributions.
You can spend a lot of money in a small amount of time, and in many cases primaries aren’t competitive (or only primaries are competitive) so this wouldn’t limit campaign spending at all.
Boy if only there was data and articles and you know a ton of talk about Walmart doing this, for years, that Bernie could have used instead of hanging out and waiting to team up with Trump to take on Amazon as an easy target for doing what the other larger retailers have been doing since forever.
Could we restrict super PACS to spending a certain amount of money per person who is a member of the PAC? That would help to prevent the top heavy PACS from spending millions unless they had at least tens of thousands of average Joes to join their billionaires, right?
You can spend any amount of money in a short time, but you will reach the point of diminishing returns very quickly. There are only so many campaign stops you can make in one day. There are only a limited number of advertising spots you can buy in one week.
We are talking about incumbents who spend all their time fundraising. If an incumbent is more worried about surviving a primary than the general, they are likely already done for.
So if my daughter was raped and the local sheriff isn’t doing anything about it so I decide I want to rent, oh I don’t know, three bill boards to shame the department into actually doing something you would require me to register as a PAC to do that if I get help from family and friends?
I thought you were talking about Super Pacs. They don’t contribute directly to the campaign like that. Didn’t you just go round and round with Timex on this?
How familiar are you with US elections? In a large fraction of Congressional seats, the district is so lopsided in party registration that the primary is the only competitive race.
