…A Tea Party demonstration, where it all started for the far right

 

The voters are making it clear that the system has to change

 

With all the comments that are being offered about all the presidential primaries that are occurring across the nation, there is only one truism that everyone seems to agree upon.  That being, that the American political electoral system is suffering from total dysfunction.

 

There is one other item that most sane Americans can agree on and that is that the US Congress should start freeing itself from big-money and special-interest domination.  They should do this by encouraging an alternative election funding system. 

 

One of the alternative election funding ideas was offered for the very first time by the Republican President Teddy Roosevelt back in 1907.  It’s a very simple idea about a system of small contributions that would be matched with public funds.

 

Something must be done going forward because one of the reasons for the rise of candidates like Donald Trump is because as Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) has stated, “The solid citizens are judging that the system isn’t responsive to them. When these folks vacate the political town square, it creates a vacuum — and the extremists take over. A second thing happens, too: By leaving, people cede the town square even more to the elites, which drives policy even further away from the real American people and what they want.”

 

To fully explain how big of a problem the “big money in politics” is today, statistics show that campaign spending for House elections have increased 610% between 1984 and 2012.  No, that’s not a typo.

 

Today’s members of Congress are caught in this dilemma. Unless there are all personally wealthy, which some are, they’re #1 Job is to spend most of their time raising money instead of doing the people’s business.

 

I find it interesting that with all the candidates that have been running for president, not one of them from the Republican Donald Trump, to the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, none have said one word about how important this issue is, or how they would fix it.

 

Rep. Sarbanes has offered his idea that should be considered for fixing the problem.

 

First, he recommends creating a 50% tax credit for small campaign donations up to $100 in every two-year election cycle. Second, to amplify the voices of small contributors, he thinks a 6-to-1 match for their donations to qualified candidates. To participate, candidates would have to raise at least $50,000 in small contributions, limit each donor to $1,000 per election and forgo money from private political action committees (PAC’s).

 

Sarbanes argues that for the members of Congress, this approach would create a real alternative to a system that many of them already hate. It gives power to the little guy: A $50 donation would become $300. A living-room gathering that collects 30 of these $50 donations would raise nearly $10,000.  

 

Because of the conservative Supreme Court’s stupid 5-4 Citizens-United decision, wealthy Political Action Committees now dominate the political space.  Sarbanes thinks his plan would be approved even with this same Supreme Court. The plan proposes a formula that would allow candidates to tap $500,000 in extra federal matching funds in the last two months of a hot campaign.

 

The public cost for this kind of program is not as high as one might expect, and it is slowly becoming a popular idea.  In fact, a recent poll by the Democracy Corps found that 72% of respondents favored this approach or something similar.

 



…The Occupy Movement, where it all started for those on the left

 

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the cost for this type of national program would be the equivalent of the Defense Department acquiring one ballistic-missile submarine. That may seems a bit high, but compared to what the wealthy private citizens such as the Koch Brothers are currently investing, it is not nearly that expensive.  And remember the old saying, “you do get what you pay for.”.

 

But getting back to the real issue, it is a dilemma that that the conservatives did not plan for when they agreed to vote for the Citizens-United case that started all of these problems.  That issue is that they didn’t plan on the current rebellion by the American voters against the political status quo which is the central political problem of 2016.

 

If the political powers that be, try to pretend that the problem will go away, that is a big mistake. This attitude by the American voter has been building for over a decade.  It started with the Tea Party on the right, and then the Occupy Movement on the left, and it has now settled into both the Trump phenomena on the right and in the large support for Bernie Sanders on the left.  It’s not going away and it could give us the worst case of an elected president in over 100 years.

 

Both of these “phenomena’s” have spawned anger and division that is making the botched political electoral system even more dysfunctional.

 

Angry, alienated Americans from both sides are making it very clear that something has to change, and it has to change soon.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016