We already accept that we can vote only where we are registered, so why do we allow campaign contributions from people and entities who can't vote where we are registered?

 The next thing you know the U.S. military won't be yours, either. It'll belong to Mellon heir billionaire Timothy Mellon.

 

... Here's a reform that would change everything: You can only donate to candidates and political organizations in the state where you are registered to vote.

Not where you own property. Not where you have business interests. Not where you "care deeply" about the issues. Where you are registered to vote – the place where you've committed to being a citizen and living with the consequences of governance.

This single rule would fundamentally reshape American politics.

 ... Change the incentives by changing where the money comes from, and you change what kind of people can succeed in politics – and what kind of Congress they create.

It's time to return politics to the people who actually have to live with the results.

 

Lindsay Mark Lewis, here. 

LOL, Mittens joins Republican squishes Bush 41, Gerald Ford and John McCain in receiving the JFK "Profile in Courage" award

Story.

Mitt Romney voted to impeach Trump.

Bush 41 raised taxes after promising not to ("Read my lips").

Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.

John McCain sponsored campaign finance reform legislation in 2002, which was partially overturned in Citizens United in 2010.

Romney's award is for Trump's first impeachment, not the second, for which Romney also voted, but I guess the six Republicans who joined Romney the second time are just chopped liver. That took took no courage whatsoever, apparently.

Campaign finance reform for the people

Under an expanded US House of Representatives, wouldn't current campaign finance laws still be a problem?

Well, duh.

But there is a simple solution.

Your man or woman in Congress should represent YOU, not Freedom Works, The Club for Growth, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood or any other national organization, including his or her own political party. It is not right that the RNC collects contributions for Kevin Yoder in Kansas-3 and spends them on the US House race of Maria Elvira Salazar in Florida-27.

Your representative should represent YOU, and the money that elects him or her should represent you, too, and therefore all campaign contributions must come from his or her congressional district, from people and businesses actually domiciled within district boundaries. That's it. No other limits.

Nancy Pelosi can raise all the money she wants from tuna companies domiciled in her district who exploit workers on Pacific islands. Let the actual residents of her (much reduced in size) district decide if they're still OK with that. And Fred Upton of Whirlpool fortune fame in Michigan can find out for himself if his much reduced number of constituents are OK with making their lightbulbs more expensive or unobtainable.

Power to the people.

Campaign finance reform: Repeal the 17th Amendment

In 2012 there were 33 Senate seats up for grabs, and the cost to a candidate of winning one averaged $10.5 million, if the popular estimates of what winning candidates raised are to be believed. That's something like $700 million total spent by both the winners and losers.

For all 435 House seats the candidates spent something like $1.5 billion, with $1.7 million spent on average by each winner.

With $6 billion total spent on the 2012 Congressional election from all sources thanks to additional PAC spending courtesy of a US Supreme Court ruling, the candidates themselves therefore spent at most $2.2 billion while outside interests spent an additional $3.8 billion to elect both "your" representative and "your" Senator. No wonder you like them so much.

The five most expensive races alone in 2012 were for Senate seats, and cost from all sources in excess of $376 million, $142 million of which came from "outside" sources, 38% of the total. Assuming that $700 million was spent by all 33 Senate candidates themselves in 2012, and adding an additional 38% from outside sources, that would put the cost of the 2012 Senate election from all sources close to $1 billion for just the 33 seats. For the whole lot of 100 Senators, then, we are in reality talking $3 billion for the whole Senate, plus the $5 billion for the whole House in that snapshot of time in 2012, for a total of $8 billion.

That makes your Senator a $30 million target, while your representative is a paltry $11.5 million one by comparison.

You could fix 72% of what's wrong with our politics in this country in an instant by repealing the popular election of Senators.

Just undo it. 

Representation Without Representation: Our Unaccountable $6 Billion Congress

According to stories here, here and here, in addition to the 535 elected members of the US Congress, there are about 10,000 staffers under various classifications who are hired by these office holders to assist them.

The average staff budget is said to be $1.5 million, which is in addition to the $174,000 annual salary of the elected representatives and senators themselves.

While the latter costs the taxpayers upwards of $93 million annually, the former is upwards of $800 million annually.

In other words, we willingly spend close to $1 billion in tax dollars every year for congressional representation which is pretty much universally despised.

And about five times as much to elect it. A CBS News/New York Times poll in October found just 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, but someone, somewhere, is pretty happy investing $5 billion to elect the right people. And "the right people" end up with net worths ten times that of their constituents.

Maybe it's time to change this.

How about following the constitution for a change?

Article 1, Section 1 of the constitution stipulates that representation "shall not exceed one for every 30,000." By that reasoning we should have a US House today with 10,000 representatives. Instead we have 435, thanks to the Republicans in the 1920s who simply refused to reapportion after the 1920 Census and fixed the number of representatives at the then current levels in 1929 through legislation.

The constitution wasn't amended. It was ignored. And today Republicans would claim the mantle of originalism. I'll believe it when I see it.

The great fear of the anti-federalists, who opposed the language of the constitution, was that no one man could conceivably represent adequately or honestly the interests of 30,000 citizens. They wanted the ratio to be smaller than that. Much smaller. Say on the order of one representative for every 15,000 of their fellows. That would imply today a US House of 20,000.

Instead what have we got?

Representation of one for 700,000 in a district, and climbing. Which is why you are so disgusted with your rich, arrogant and corrupt representative. He represents the guy who pays him the money he needs to advertise on radio and television so that you at least recognize his name and picture every two years and believe some stupid lie he tells about how he represents your interests even though he doesn't even know you exist. The last thing he wants is the real competition and anonymity of being just one of 20,000.

Imagine if your representative represented only 15,000 people. Chances are he would have to work pretty hard to get elected because no special interest is going to fork over millions just for his lousy vote.

He might even ring your doorbell.

What would it cost?

Even if you paid them all the same salary as we do today, half the anti-federalists' number, 10,100 representatives and senators, would cost us $1.76 billion. Their legislation might actually improve if we eliminated all their staff positions and made the elected do the actual work for a change. Throw in some campaign finance reform which stipulates contributions originate within the new districts, and repeal of the 17th Amendment, and you have a nice little package a decent presidential candidate could win on easily.

So far, however, none of them have enough imagination to see that 91 percent of the country is already ripe for the ideas.

If only they had some.