Just a few ideas
1. Outlaw lobbying
2. Senators, congressmen and the President only serve one term; increase senatorial terms to 10 years, congressional terms to 4 years, and the presidential term to 6 years.
3. No primaries; instead, there is an initial election with candidates of any/no party in October and, if required, a run-off in November.
4. Both of those election days are federal holidays.
5. Publicly finance all campaigns.
Will any of this ever be done? No. Those in power want their campaign contributions and limit-less terms. Point 2 and possibly point 3 would also require a constitutional amendment.
posted by Paul @ 9:16 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I'm with you on this! Well said.
People who don't know that changing the federal elections from the first tuesday after the first monday in November would require a constitutional amendment shouldn't be allowed to offer governmental solutions.
Notice I said it possibly would require a constitutional amendment. The election on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November would still be there, but an additional one would be added. But I guess your name says it all.
So if one candidate got a majority of the votes, thereby negating the need for a run-off, then no election would take place on the constitutionally-designated day, correct? So there is no "possibly" about it.
And if you outlawed lobbying, corruption would run rampant. Lobbying requires formal disclosures and regulation. If you banned it, you would still have people motivated to influence how the government spends money. But now you just removed any sort of oversight into the process.
Fine then add the run-off after the election. I could have left the whole sentence about amending the constitution out and this would all be moot, so it's a bit ridiculous to say I shouldn't express an opinion ("Just a few ideas" was the title of the post) because I added details that are correct but not complete.
There has to be a system in which the public can influence its leaders that will work better than the current system. The overall goal here should be to shift the energy spent by politicians away from getting money for their next election and put that energy into running the country effectively.
There is a way to do just that - take the money out of the system. As long as the federal government controls a wallet containing $3,000,000,000,000+ dollars, you're going to have people interested in helping them figure out how to spend it. And that's going to lead to shenanigans regardless of what you do with term limits, elections, oversight, etc. If you limit the amount of money they get to spend, you shift their focus from electioneering to actual governing.
Wow - These are some of the most well thought out reasonable ideas I have seen in days. Usually it is just name calling and blaming each other for stuff coming from people who only read the headlines and not the article. Cool!
Leann, you're a poophead.
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