I like the ideal that no politician should be beholden to deep-pocketed political donors but how would that work in practice? Would all candidates have to be self-funded, thus ruling out anyone who wasn’t already wealthy? Would every candidate who collected enough signatures to appear on the ballot just get an equal amount of money from a common fund to spend on campaign ads and outreach? Would it still be legal for grassroots organizations to spend their own money supporting a particular candidate or cause?
Taking one cent, ever, from the NRA should disqualify you from ever running for office as a Democrat
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Are you saying this when billionaire donors tell the DNC their money will stop flowing if candidates don’t stop saying billionaire?
The candidates will be publicly funded with tax dollars. They can spend their limited campaign funds as they see fit. We’ll give them a six week campaign period and during that time we’ll host some Q&A events and actual proper debates on national television and campaign websites.
Grass roots organizations are welcome to spend limitless funds in support of their candidates. They’re only allowed to use those funds for marketing their candidates to members of that particular grass roots organization. That is to say, the only way I should hear the Crossroads GPS message is if I join up with them. In a perfect world, I could join 42 different so-called grassroots organizations and be given a different steak dinner every single night of the campaign season.
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How do we determine who gets to be one of those candidates, and how do we ensure monied candidates don’t have an unfair advantage in that selection process?
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Can we maybe have a larger discussion about money in US politics? Like, could there be some reasonable limits both to the amounts a candidate can accept and to limit donations in other ways?
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Maybe the point is that hard-and-fast declarations of things disqualifying someone from ever running as a Democratic candidate are bad, and instead of this kind of posturing purity tests, no matter how emotionally satisfying they are in the wake of yet another mass shooting, people should look at context and realize things are almost never just black and white.
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I disagree with this extremist position, as the NRA in the past would make alibi donations: just enough to pretend to be bipartisan, but small enough that the candidate’s staff wouldn’t really notice it. And if we made this a litmus test, it will kick off both a witch hunt as well as “sabotage donations” – that is, donations made solely for the purpose of making the candidate fail the litmus test.
Elect the person, not the character sheet. We humans are not absolutes.
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I’ll be in charge of that.
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I’ll keep looking for the ones who don’t play games with governance.
Wow, those are really their names? Sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon about a highwayman duck and a country-singer, er, also duck.
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