Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Campaign Finance Reform: A modest proposal to end the corruption.

Honestly I'm not sure how modest this is because I think the solution is so common sense and awesome that I'm surprised it came outta my head...and the odds are good that I assimilated the idea in the past and it just popped up, so if you are the originator, my hat is off to you!

Let's keep campaign finance reform simple with a one line piece of legislation.

You are only allowed to raise money from those that you represent.

That's it. Short. Sweet. To the point. No more lobbyists. No more strong arming from the DNC/RNC to vote a certain way. No more sharing funds between politicians. Corruption removed. Responsibility to constituents restored.

Representatives can only raise money from their districts. Senators can raise money from their own state.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a lawyer, but this law shouldn't have the limitation of freedom of speech problem the McCain-Feingold had. Businesses can contribute - but only if they are located in the specific district/state of the donation recipient. This actually levels the playing field regardless of whether the district is a tiny rural one or contains a huge metropolis. Haven't been serving your district well? Perhaps you won't get the funding and that'll be your sign.

In a day and age where bills are not necessarily based on common sense and are 2000+ pages long this would be quite refreshing. Keeping it simple removes the loopholes.

So what do you think?

WOW. has it really been 9 months?

No - I have not been pregnant as that would've at least made the pages of the National Enquirer or Weekly World News. I haven't been missing. I haven't been on a secret mission. I've been paying more attention to two things are more important than my rants - My Family and My Business. When I start posting here regularly I tend to think about "the next post" far too much. So I stopped.

What has brought me back for a guest appearance on my own blog? The uprising we see in Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan. The article that made me start composing a post in my head (much to my chagrin) is about Jordan and how the tribes are starting to talk trash about the royalty ( Jordan tribes break taboo by targeting queen). This in itself is remarkable, but a specific quote from this article is what started my head spinning.

Arab peoples used to fear their authoritarian regimes. Things have changed and now Arab leaders fear their peoples.

That's a powerful change of mindset and one that should reverberate over here. It's too often that our leaders forget that they work for the citizenry. It's too often they don't "fear their peoples". Not fear in a fear of violence way, but in a fear of other retribution like getting voted out. There seems to be a pattern of doing whatever the lobbyist/national committee tell them to do until it's re-election time.

Perhaps a little of that fear during the in-between years would go a long way towards making better decisions on our behalf.