[jacobolus]

Campaign finance reform is dead in the water as long as the Republicans control Congress (and as long as, per Citizens United, unlimited corporate spending on political advertising is considered protected speech).

So if we agree with Lessig that campaign finance reform is the most important national political priority, then electing a Democratic majority to the House is the necessary precondition. (I’m not saying you should agree with that, but it’s the premise of Lessig’s campaign.)

[gonehome]

Not really - The premise of Lessig's campaign is that the party in power is irrelevant, neither can do it because they're both corrupted by their need to raise funds (and notably that the people funding them are not the public).

This is partly why his ideas to fix it seem drastic - there really aren't any non drastic solutions that can work.

https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...

It has nothing to do with which party is in power - the affect of fundraising has corrupted the underlying incentives of the entire congress.

I found his book on the topic pretty convincing: http://republic.lessig.org/

[gonehome]

As a follow up - I like Lessig a lot and agree with most of his ideas. The tragic thing is that politics isn't really idea driven at scale, it's more controversy and 'alpha monkey' driven. Lessig comes off as a quiet and reasonable academic - he needs somebody as his front man that can be more forceful that the media will give more attention to (though I do think his presentations are really good).

[humanrebar]

> unlimited corporate spending on political advertising is considered protected speech

Probably an unpopular opinion in this thread, but...

It has always been protected speech. The Supreme Court just declined to make a distinction between The New York Times and an arbitrary group of citizens (or even a single citizen) doing a one-off publication.

[rayiner]

Yup. Citizens United wasn't a "is money speech case?" It was a case about whether the government could ban an unflattering movie about one of the leading candidates in the election. Its core political speech and always has been.

[comex]

So where do you think we should go from here? Honestly. I share your misgivings about regulating political speech, but then we get things like

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/20...

Whether or not you agree with the slant of that article, it is a fact that Super PACs have enabled a massive centralization of political contributions - which, even if there's a limit on how much advertising can accomplish in general (cf. Trump), is still fundamentally undemocratic, and should be fought. We probably can't just go back to how things used to be, so how do we go forward?

[hga]

And people should really be thinking twice about the consequences of suppressing core political speech from those they don't like, be it a single citizen publishing a book (in oral arguments the government admitted that fell into the McCain-Feingold ban), an arbitrary group of citizens producing and distributing a video about a public figure running for office, or the eeeeevil NRA with its five million members amplifying their voices in collective action, which e.g. AlwaysBCoding in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10403569 explicitly wants to silence (note below that one of the ways to achieve such survey results is to keep gun owners in the dark about what's actually being proposed).

Is "democracy" really enhanced by silencing one very large but disfavored side of the debate, by the side that just so happens to be catastrophically losing it? Was this what our founderes were thinking about when they had the 1st Amendment to the Constitution enshrine freedom of speech and the press?

To bring this back to Hillary!, the subject of the * GOVERNMENT CENSORED * 2008 campaign Citizens United video---yes, this really happened, the FEC got the District Court for the District of Columbia to ban it, per Wikipedia it "found that the film had no purpose other than to discredit Clinton's candidacy for president", which obviously is beyond the pale---well, in the debate a few days ago, echoing Obama's recent statements, she called for outright mass confiscation of guns with a token "buyback" compensation. I could put this advertisment together in a few hours, a few minutes if I was into video editing: http://www.pagunblog.com/2015/10/16/hillary-clinton-endorses...:

The ad for the general election writes itself:

Scene 1: “In Australia, the government confiscated 1/3 of the guns in the country. In America, 1/3 would be around 120 million guns”.

Scene 2: footage from Australia of big piles of guns getting ready to be melted down (it’s on YouTube in a documentary).

Scene 3: footage of Hillary saying Australia is a good example of what we should do in America.

Note that the NRA helped demolish the 1988 Dukakis campaign for President publicizing an even more clear quote, "I do not believe in people owning guns, only police and military. I am going to do everything I can to disarm this state.", which was the sole copy on a solid black background that was the chilling, high impact cover of the November 1988 issue of the American Rifleman. They wouldn't have been able to do if McCain-Feingold had been law back then.

These people want to deny us the soap box to present these incontestable facts, effectively denying us the ballet box by keeping the vast majority of affected gun owners in the dark. They really should think about which box follows.

[wyldfire]

I agree with your all of your concerns. But what if all campaigns for office were funded with public money instead of private money?

Seems like it would solve some of the stated problems without arguing over what some would call a "loophole" but others would recognize as "free speech."

[hga]

But what if all campaigns for office were funded with public money instead of private money?

Then the game changes to who gets allocated said public money. Can't see how that wouldn't entrench the establishment a zillion times more. Note Trump's effectiveness because he can ignore the Republican Party donor class riot, which is in stark opposition to the majority of the party's base.

For those eeeevil people who nonetheless managed to get some, prosecuting them for not following one of the zillions of non-statutory but still the force of law rules they will inevitably break. Using another example of fighting gun control (because I know the most about how this has played out since the early '70s), here's just one notorious example of how that "works" http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/cac-info.htm (note, that's from a very partisan group, not the milquetoast NRA). That's sort of thing is also happening in Connecticut right now post-Sandy Hook.

Ah, and a useful analogy from fighting gun control: a lot of the laws in place and proposed are, as Michael Bane put it, "flypaper laws", designed to trap the unwary in "crimes" entirely lacking in mens rea or any actual good public policy results, resulting in a chilling effect on Constitutionally protected actions.

Same exact thing here, "campaign reforms" by the goo-goos, especially financial ones, have a greater chilling effect on genuine citizen grassroots actions. You have to hire really good legal council, and surprise, surprise, pretty much all those lawyers are already retained by the existing political parties and their units. And even then we see atrocities like the political prosecutions of Tom Delay and Ted Stevens, eventually reversed by higher courts but not before accomplishing the mission of removing them from politics.

[rayiner]

Public financing is totally orthogonal to Citizens United. Even if campaigns were publicly financed, you couldn't stop independent organizations from blasting the airwaves with advertising supporting their preferred candidate.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Even if campaigns were publicly financed, you couldn't stop independent organizations from blasting the airwaves with advertising supporting their preferred candidate.

In theory there could be a large tax on broadcasting/advertising with the proceeds going equally to every declared candidate who can meet some threshold number of constituent signatures. Then the more money people spend on political advertising, the more each politician gets to respond to it, but the entire scheme is content-neutral.

[humanrebar]

It's a good idea, but I don't see how the details work.

Would the government give out money to anyone who ran? How do you stop someone from using the funds for an election campaign that is indistinguishable from an audition for FoxNews or MSNBC contributor? No matter what the bar is for funding, the government would be picking winners and losers, right?

Would you ban private donations to campaigns? What about private speech that advocates for a candidate?

I'm not sure what that public money buys us that other regulations couldn't do better.

If we're worried about getting information to voters, requiring all public debates be in the public domain and posted in standard web formats seems like a sensible first step.

[tonfa]

There's examples elsewhere. Eg France has public campaign financing (any candidate getting more than X% of votes gets reimbursed, and there is a ceiling on how much you're allowed to spend on campaigning) and pretty strict fairness rules for political advertisement and airtime during campaign time.

[jkestner]

States are usually good testbeds for new ideas. Arizona has had "Clean Elections" with public money for 20 years and it works well.

[JackFr]

If you want to keep corporations from giving money to politicians, the only effective way to do it is to stop politicians from giving corporations money.

Limiting the scope of government is not ideological -- its pragmatic and practical.

[hga]

Or shaking corporations down. A whole lot of "gridlock" is merely milking proposals that'll help or hurt various companies and sectors, and collecting contributions to continue preventing the bad or pushing for the good. Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets is (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0544103343) a really good book on the subject, taught me things I didn't know despite watching this sort of thing closely starting around the time of Watergate, like how there's a type of PAC a Congresscritter can establish that can be legally converted to subsidize their lifestyle.

This is one of the reasons for the constant changes in the tax code, despite the great uncertainty this creates for businesses and people. The obsession with short term results makes more sense when you realize long term financial planning is literally impossible (yeah, technically you might get that widget into production in a few years, but you really don't know how much money you'll be allowed to make from selling it).

[jjoonathan]

And what about politicians who give money to corporations by limiting the scope of government (see: deregulating energy markets -> Enron buys up capacity and shuts it down -> rolling blackouts and $$ in their pockets as prices spiked)?

Regulations aren't the only cause of friction, perverse incentives, and exploitative business models. They're also pretty much the only tool we have against tragedies of the commons. Deciding which regulations are good and which are bad is inherently ideological, and the declaration that we should generally assume they're bad is so extreme that Adam Smith himself would disapprove.

[JackFr]

I am not against unreasonable regulation, rather I'm in favor of broad principled regulation that takes the form laws passed by Congress and interpreted by courts. The Securities and Exchange Act of 1933 is a good example as was Glass-Steagall.

A law like Dodd-Frank on the other hand is an example of rent seeking by banks while Congress gets bought off while they act under the guise of 'reining in the banks.'

[unethical_ban]

It enrages me that you got downvoted, because I've thought this for almost as long as I've had political thought. Corporations and lobbyists would stop buying politicians if the scope of power were limited.