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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. |