There's a good chance it could have the opposite effect. The public doesn't pay as much attention to the workings of the government as donors do.
It's essentially an extension of the Sunshine Act of 1976, which made congressional votes public. There were claims that before it was enacted, legislators were able to vote their consciences, but then lie to donors and tell them they voted for their interests instead of their constituents' interests.
Since it passed, the public has been paying attention, but not like the donor class has been. Something needs to be not only bad, but have some sort of novel or salacious quality to make the news. If it's not near an election, people forget, if they paid attention to begin with. Donors pay attention. Representatives know this.
Ultimately, the problem is the money in politics, but this sort of thing can exacerbate the effects.
As long as there are people who allocate billions with a sign of the pen, with zero personal responsibility and skin in the game, there will be whole industries dedicated to swaying their hand.
I don't think this is necessarily a good policy. I'm saying it's obviously blatantly untrue to suggest that just because people will always want to corrupt public officials, that they will be equally successful in all possible universes.
It's also untrue to suggest that any intervention will necessarily create a worse outcome than the status quo.
We need to amend the Constitution to strike pardon power and give the Congress the power to pass property taxes (aka wealth taxes) and regulate donations to campaigns, candidates, parties and partisan causes.
We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make corruption charges easier to bring.
This is an observation about the world in general, not U.S. politics specifically. Prosecuting elected officials basically means that you trust the bureaucracy more than voters. This has not proven to be a successful approach.
We have been very lucky in the U.S. to avoid these problems. And it's not because nobody before Trump ever did anything rising to the level of paying off a porn star and calling it "legal expenses." It's because we have had a taboo against prosecuting politicians.
You can't police that. The only thing you can reliably do is allocate power. If you allocate power to prosecutors to prosecute elected officials, you've basically handed them the power to decide who people are allowed to vote for. This power gets abused in virtually every country where it's normalized.
The safeguards within the justice system are appropriate for prosecuting individuals. They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.
If you don't believe that, then consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose. Except only Texas courts and prosecutors have jurisdiction.
> If you allocate power to prosecutors to prosecute elected officials, you've basically handed them the power to decide who people are allowed to vote for
Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.
> consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose
> Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.
Courts are designed to make decisions about individual cases, not ones that affect the trajectory of the whole country. It’s simply the wrong tool for the job.
> Literally the current DoJ and FBI
Not even close. I don’t think you can even find a prosecutor’s office and jury pool that’s as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool. AOC’s district is MAGA by comparison at 33% Trump voters.
The DOJ has thousands of lawyers, almost all of whom are are the most ideological kind of democrats.[1] Law is a very specialized field that attracts a very narrow, highly unrepresentative slice of the population. Normally this is fine because the DOJ’s work doesn’t have much of a political valance.
[1] Every DOJ person I know is a great lawyer, phenomenal at their job, and the most upstanding, orderly, conscientious type of American. But they can’t be trusted with that much power over politics. It’s like how you can’t give the One Ring to Gandalf. You have to give it to the Hobbits.
As expected, you ignore the actual complaint and just draw specious comparisons, making unsubstantiated claims that "most" of the people at the DoJ are totally democrats, trust me dude.
The alternative being that a criminal can have perma-immunity by simply running for office or getting elected?
> They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.
Right, they're set up to ascertain guilt of a crime. Why is it or should it be their concern if people want to vote for that person or if that person has political aspirations?
You're advocating for criminal law to simply not apply to some people. That is fucking insane.
> 1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term
2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice
I like No. 1.
No. 2 seems overcomplicated compared with staggering retirements in the way Art. 1 § 3 cl. 2 staggers the Senate. The Senate is also more diverse than the Presidency; limiting the latter would check against some dirty tricks.
I think everyone understands this already. But there's also a big difference between making it easy for industries to sway politicians and difficult. That's what actually matters.
To put it another way, I still put a lock on my door even though lockpicks exist. I still use passwords on my accounts even though people could guess or brute force them.
I don't know what the answer to public votes is. I see the benefit in them voting their conscience. But I also see how they can vote against my interests and then lie through their teeth that they are helping me if I can't see their record.
But voting today is such a performative act for them. There are great pieces of legislation that can't pass because someone has labeled it as radical so one side or the other can't be seen with their name on it so they don't pass it even though they know it is good and would benefit their constituents.
is money the problem or just that most people don't care about most things, but a few people REALLY care about a few things? There's plenty of groups without much money that still gum up the works because they're persistent.
People worrying about money in politics are overemphasizing the instrumentality of money, rather than the underlying structural incentives that tend toward special interests dominating complex issues.
If money were removed from the equation, the concentrations of power, motivations to influence it, and asymmetries in those motivations will all continue to exist; political influence will just be exercised through other means, and some particular faction or class of people will still be at the sweet spot of having the greatest competence and the greatest motivation to apply those means.
A lot of people are reluctant to acknowledge it, but this is inherent to politics itself, and there is no straightforward way to fix it, other than to limit the reach of political power.
It's slightly more complex though isn't? Because the actual problem is how to limit the reach of political power while still having an effective government.
In a vacuum I absolutely agree with you. In fact my PoliSci 101 prof defined politics as “who has power and how they use it” but in a system like ours where money also is a form of power (or at least a force multiplier of power) unto itself, money helps concentrate political power into fewer hands and magnify the ways they can use it.
It certainly would be naive to think that simply “getting money out of politics” would “fix” things but it is still a desirable goal for anyone who, themselves, does not currently have extremely large quantities of money.
It's amazing how you've managed to position "politicians were pursuing their own hidden agendas and then lying about it" as a desirable state of affairs.
It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There's quite a lot of strange bias in your comment: the unjustified disjunction between "constituents" and "donors", the concept of a "donor class" as some singular bloc rather than an arbitrary aggregation of anyone who donates on behalf on all sides of all issues, the idea that donations are more important than the actual votes, etc.
That seems like an assumption, and a counterintuitive one: wouldn't you expect someone getting "fleeced" by the political system to be motivated to pay attention due to that very fact?
If you have a system of open transparency, then everyone who is motivated to pay attention has the means to do so. If they're not paying attention, it means they're not sufficiently motivated, and are choosing not to pay attention, not being constrained artificially.
This seems to be converging to some sort of "false consciousness" argument, where someone speculatively projects motivations and intentions onto other parties, then criticizes those other parties for not acting in accordance with the motivations strangers have projected onto them.
Needless to say, these sorts of arguments are utterly disingenuous, and in this case, somewhat ironic, because the people arguing that outcomes should conform to their speculative ideologies -- even in defiance of what the public themselves are manifestly choosing -- are themselves special interests trying to exert their own influence over politics.
> It sounds like they were defrauding people into giving them donations under false pretenses, and the transparency measures were effective at mitigating that.
There are no pretenses in political giving (at least at the U.S. federal level), because it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician. It’s called a quid pro quo and is the test for whether a donation is a bribe.
In the U.S. the political system is based on people, not positions or policy. Donations to a politician are to the person. It’s not a proxy for buying an outcome.
In practice, of course people are going to support politicians who they like and think agree with them. But under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
Which makes the initial promise to vote a certain way in exchange for donations itself illegal. That seems fine. So what is the problem with transparency, again?
This subthread is a discussion about pertains to politicians misrepresenting their voting intentions in order to get donations. My comment was a response to an argument that allowing politicians to do this is a good thing because it allows them to vote their "consciences" while pretending otherwise to people donating to them.
Perhaps not precisely, but it is a proxy for attempting to influence an outcome.
> under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.
Isn't that in conflict with:
> it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician.
Are you saying that if I give a politician money and express my desire that they are then legally bound to vote according to my desire? Sounds like buying votes; I'm pretty sure that's not condoned by the law.
In practice there is a donor class and constituent class who are largely not the same set of people. The point you’re missing is how the donor class is instrumental in influencing the actual language that goes into the laws, this happens peripheral to the democratic process. For example, a spending bill where the language favors one vendor over others because that vendor paid to submit their suggested language. This is not hypothetical btw.
It's essentially an extension of the Sunshine Act of 1976, which made congressional votes public. There were claims that before it was enacted, legislators were able to vote their consciences, but then lie to donors and tell them they voted for their interests instead of their constituents' interests.
Since it passed, the public has been paying attention, but not like the donor class has been. Something needs to be not only bad, but have some sort of novel or salacious quality to make the news. If it's not near an election, people forget, if they paid attention to begin with. Donors pay attention. Representatives know this.
Ultimately, the problem is the money in politics, but this sort of thing can exacerbate the effects.