Oren - I'll follow up on this comment and ask if there's any movement on the new right regarding campaign spending?
I'll admit that when Citizens United came out, I was sympathetic to the decision because our system should allow people to make a movie saying Hillary shouldn't be president and distribute it within 30 days of the election. …
Oren - I'll follow up on this comment and ask if there's any movement on the new right regarding campaign spending?
I'll admit that when Citizens United came out, I was sympathetic to the decision because our system should allow people to make a movie saying Hillary shouldn't be president and distribute it within 30 days of the election. And if I have a bunch of money and a cause that's important to me, it's really dangerous for the government to be able to stop me from promoting my cause.
But things have gotten so much worse since then that I'm willing to consider pretty aggressive actions. I'm not confident at all that I have a solution that will have an impact - I'm naturally skeptical of something like public financing of elections, but at this point I'm willing to consider it, and I feel like there should be a way to distinguish a truly independent PAC from a slush fund controlled by a campaign surrogate that is only nominally independent. But those kind of distinctions can only happen if the political class wants to make campaign spending an issue.
This seems like a good fit with the new right's distrust of corporate power, so I'd love to see more attention paid to the issue - and maybe working with someone like David Sirota on policy ideas that could appeal to dissidents on both sides? I really liked the series they recently put out on campaign finance called Master Plan.
Oren - I'll follow up on this comment and ask if there's any movement on the new right regarding campaign spending?
I'll admit that when Citizens United came out, I was sympathetic to the decision because our system should allow people to make a movie saying Hillary shouldn't be president and distribute it within 30 days of the election. And if I have a bunch of money and a cause that's important to me, it's really dangerous for the government to be able to stop me from promoting my cause.
But things have gotten so much worse since then that I'm willing to consider pretty aggressive actions. I'm not confident at all that I have a solution that will have an impact - I'm naturally skeptical of something like public financing of elections, but at this point I'm willing to consider it, and I feel like there should be a way to distinguish a truly independent PAC from a slush fund controlled by a campaign surrogate that is only nominally independent. But those kind of distinctions can only happen if the political class wants to make campaign spending an issue.
This seems like a good fit with the new right's distrust of corporate power, so I'd love to see more attention paid to the issue - and maybe working with someone like David Sirota on policy ideas that could appeal to dissidents on both sides? I really liked the series they recently put out on campaign finance called Master Plan.
Well said. Transparency is key to minimize corruption of any plan.