Do sex, campaign money, and Change Congress's new "donor strike" go together?
According to U.S. News & World Report, they do. Here's an excerpt from their story, "Sex, Campaign Money, and Cleaning Up Politics":
Don't like how our politics are paid for? Some people who agree are pushing what I can only call the Lysistrata campaign finance reform plan. In the ancient Greek comedy, women withheld sex from their soldier husbands until they agreed to end an ongoing war.
Substitute sex for money and you have what the folks over at Change Congress are pushing: that donors go "on strike," refusing to give their money to pols until a campaign finance overhaul is passed (specifically, they favor a system whereby people limiting themselves to small donations would get matching government funds).They say that they've gotten no-contribution pledges from people who gave $400,000 to federal candidates in the last cycle.
So, you heard it from U.S. News & World Report first! Change Congress is bringing sexy back... to the campaign finance reform debate. (Step aside, Justin Timberlake.)
The "donor strike" has amazing momentum, but we need your help to keep going. There are two things you can do today.
First, if you haven't already, join the strike. We're at $422,000 in donations withheld -- can you help us get to $500,000? With every new striker, we are increasing the pressure on Congress to pass fundamental reform. It's easy, just click here.
Second, because Change Congress is fighting the special interests, we don't get money from the fat cats. So we depend on people like you. We're setting a goal of raising $100,000 in the next month -- starting today. This will allow us to really turn up the pressure on Congress -- including targeted events in local districts -- to make sure politicians are well aware of how much money they're losing if they oppose reform. If you care about cleaning up our democracy, please help us keep our successful "donor strike" campaign going by chipping in here today.
The donor strike's also been featured in the Associated Press, National Journal, Huffington Post, ABC News, and Green Mountain Daily (Vermont). Working together, we're making progress on this fundamental reform issue -- and your help today will greatly help us keep the momentum going.
Thanks for helping to change Congress.
-- Lawrence Lessig & Joe Trippi
Doctors scream that the "special interest" trial lawyers buy off the Democrats, so "real tort reform" can't get enacted and harming patients. Trial lawyers yell that those darn "special interest" doctors seek special protections for inept doctors, harming patients. Helpful, huh?
Every American, whether you agree with them or not, has the right to promote their issues, agenda, perspectives, and priorities to the government and their fellow citizens. What so many here fail utterly to appreciate is that Americans are not a monolithic bloc who generally share the same ideological perspective on what government should and should not be doing or allowing, and how it should or should not go about doing or allowing citizens to do.
Campaign finance "reform" assumes that there is no reasonable disagreement among citizens, that if only certain voices could be limited or eliminated from the political debate then our elected officials could quickly and easily adopt measures that the overwhelming majority of Americans want.
We might as well have Cuban-style politics, where debate is allowed within very narrow boundaries, and anything else gets you sent to the Gulag.
Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
www.campaignfreedom.org
sparnell@campaignfreedom.org
The older I get, the more I wonder: what's so horrible about direct democracy? In other words, having people vote on issues directly, rather than electing representatives who then (behind closed doors, in interminable committee meetings) vote on the issues?
The Founding Fathers decried this as "mob rule," but I wonder...
Flaws and all, representative government is still the best option--but we as voters need to vote for effectiveness, not just popularity. Besides, do you really want someone with an 8th grade education making direct decisions about global economic or environmental policy?
The ones the State doesn't like they find ways to declare them unconstitutional, like term limits, or Right to Die. Representative government is just not working. We have elected rulers who take their orders from the Rich and Corporations. The Corporate Media either supports the Corporate line or attacks any populist politician that comes down the pike. We need term limits, campaign finance reform and direct voting.
The publicly financed alternative that Change Congress, Public Campaign and many other groups and individuals support would amplify the speech of ordinary citizens who are in a financial position to make only small donations and allow candidates to run competitive campaigns without having to appeal to the deep-pocketed lobbying crowd in Washington DC.
Anyone who defends the current private system should start by telling us how the $2 billion that Wall Street and the financial services sector pumped into federal elections over the past two decades led to sounder decision-making by Congress on financial regulatory policy during that time.
The poster below ("breakfast") has it right, however: all that withholding personal contributions will do will be to make the control of Big Business over the elections permanent.
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In the end, which is more important. Making sure "our guy" is elected, or making sure that, once elected, the public servant actually SERVES the public?
I think we are focusing on the wrong scandal here. Elections are just the bread and circuses of the American experiment. The real issue should be, how do we reduce the influence of money on politics AFTER elections?
We need to make the day-to-day politics transparent and accountable again, instead of focusing so much on the dog and pony show of elections.
Silly idea, but maybe a good topic of conversation at your cocktail parties.
Let me get this straight - "reformers" believe it's bad to have politicians vote based on who's giving them money and what the interests of their donors are, especially "special interest groups." So the answer is to create a special interest group and tell politicians that they won't get any money from you until they vote the way you want.
Did I sum that up right?
There's much to mock here, but I'll just focus on one point - the "special interest groups" that Lessig is so concerned about are Americans too, with the First Amendment right to promote their cause to their government. This applies whether you're the NRA or Sierra Club or Planned Parenthood or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the AFL-CIO. We The People are the "special interests" that Lessig and Trippi want to drive from the political process. Kind of frightening, no?
Sean Parnell
President
Center for Competitive Politics
www.campaignfreedom.org
sparnell@campaignfreedom.org
You ask "Did I sum that up right?" The answer is no. Thanks for double-checking.
Basically, there are two groups of political givers. Those who give because they want special influence over politicians. And others who give because they are inspired by a politician's positions and want that person to get elected, but not in pursuit of any disproportionate clout. The first category can be called "special interests" -- they think their contributions make them special. The second category can be called Obama-style grassroots donations -- people who are inspired, and whose donations are the future of politics.
The "donor strike" is the public giving politicians a choice: You can have special interest money, or you can have our money, but you can no longer have both.
The net result, as we've already seen on the state level: Politicians who spend their time courting small-dollar donations from regular people and speaking to their needs --- not begging for money from special interests whose support is contingent on having disproportionate ("special") clout over the lawmaking process.
Again, thanks for asking. Always good to have members of anti-reform groups who are willing to question their own ideas.
Adam Green
Americans ARE "special interests" -- Sean Parnell was right on that point.
What Mr. Parnell is dead wrong about -- and I read his web page, it's relentlessly pro-money politics -- is "misunderestimating" the corrosive power of money (all money) on politics. Money fundamentally changes the equation from "one man, one vote," to "he who has the most gold, makes the rules."
Mr. Lessig is correct in his belief that publicly-funded elections are a better choice. They still aren't perfect; they won't eliminate fraud and graft *after* the election, but they'll go a long way towards making sure that the person who is the most "business friendly" isn't *always* the person who gets elected.