I'm actually pleasantly surprised by this. Now, let's go a step further after this is signed, and work on campaign financing. If the candidates we choose don't have to be stinking rich to compete, we might get some good honest candidates for once who have our interests in mind.
Apropos of which, I had a long talk on this subject with Joe Biden, way back in 2005. He insisted that well over 95% of the people who go into politics - the House and Senate - are
very honest people who actually
do have our best interests in mind. They may not all agree with each other, but they all really care about the country.
The problem, he told me - and it's a big one - is that literally the day after their inauguration into office, they are dragged to an office across the street, put in front of a phone, given a list of names and numbers, and told they have to start fundraising for the Party to "repay" the fact that their name had either an (R) or a (D) next to it on the ballot. And he wasn't kidding. If your winning ballot has an (R) or (D) next to your name, you owe the Party -
either Party - big time.
Joe told me that all the freshman legislators come into office chomping at the bit to serve the public, and to fulfill their campaign promises, but they're
not allowed to until they do enough fund raising for the Party. And who are they calling? The donors who have money. The ones who have, in the past, bought $2,000 to $20,000 plates at Party fund raising lunches and dinners. So quite naturally, those become the people a legislator comes to identify as their "constituent" - because those are the people who have their ears. When you are cold-calling for money, you're not talking to students, pensioners, the poor, or even what we know as the "middle class". You're talking only to people with a lot of disposable income. It is
those people who are bending your ear, telling you what
they want, and what
they expect from you. It skews your perspective.
It's time to stop letting special interests pick our candidates.
And since the tsunami of dark money after the Citizen's United decision, we don't even know who is buying our candidates. We can't even tell what country owns our elected representatives. Who are our congresspeople working for? Saudi Arabia? Israel? India? China? .....
Russia!??!
All we seem to know for sure is that they aren't working for us. And this should concern every American on both sides of the aisle. Conservatives, Liberals and Centrists alike should ALL make our number one political priority to get the money out of our politics. Until we do that, we'll never get our country back. It will just continue to belong to moneyed interests.