There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way.
If we really want reform, the system should be changed from a first-past-the-post presidential system to a parliamentary system with party-list proportional representation. Neither system is perfect, but the latter captures a wider range of views within society.
Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has been systematically attacking all attempts to limit private campaign finance, including public funding.
In 2011, in Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett, they ruled that a program that Arizona established which would give campaigns that opted out of private financing public financing matching their competitors financing infringed on the First Amendment speech rights of the privately financed campaign.
That's right, matching private campaign spending with public funding violates the free speech of the privately funded campaign, because it removes their advantage.
The solution to campaign finance needs to start and end with court reform, or it's DOA.
Exactly what reforms do you want? If you want first amendment restrictions you can look into passing another amendment. That's really how that's supposed to work. The logic behind the ruling is fine if you actually dig into it - funding is speech, government funding of some candidates and not others dilutes the speech of some citizens and effectively compels speech from other citizens through the government. A better approach would be restricting all political advertising to some government provided platform. This would avoid the wasteful government matching.
That line of logic is utterly insane even at a glance because it argues that citizens cannot be taxed for something they don’t support.
Shall we ask the DEA when they’ll be issuing refunds?
“Diluting” speech is equally incoherent. The presidents state of the nation address drags people away from my Twitter feed, so the government is diluting my speech. If the argument is just that the government can’t do anything that would make a citizen less heard, the government ceases to function because practically everything they do is more consequential than any citizens opinion.
The First Amendment doesn’t even say anything about being heard. It is a right to speak, not a right to be heard. Funding a candidate does not remove the right or ability for other candidates to speak.
> A better approach would be restricting all political advertising to some government provided platform.
This is not even close to passing even a cursory First Amendment analysis. Telling people they can’t advertise on Facebook/Google/etc is absolutely a First Amendment issue. It is literal speech, and the right to express it is abridged by location. This will never happen without an amendment.
The better solution is to continue respecting the First Amendment and not trying to restrict in any way, political speech, and instead reforming the electoral system so that the volume of speech one is able to output through the expenditure of financial resources does not have an impact on election outcomes.
The Supreme Court is defending the First Amendment, and "court reform" is a euphemism for eliminating the independence of the judiciary in order to dismantle those First Amendment protections.
Supreme Court justices are taking bribes to deliver outcomes their cronies want, and "court reform" is a euphemism for holding justices selling our country accountable.
That was a good decision, because the rule creates a negative responsiveness paradox. Spending money to support your preferred candidate should not make opposing candidates stronger.
That was the effect of Arizona's rule: money spent to promote a candidate was matched by free public money, which the opposing candidate did not have exert any effort to obtain.
Good voting systems minimize this effect. The US first-past-the-post system is not a good voting system, but that's no excuse for making it worse.
Yard signs, phone calls, websites, GOTV operations, consultants, debates, mailers, all of these things cost money. The current system requires you to appeal to donors with a winning message to get contributions to pay for these.
Who decides which candidates get limited public funds? Are you just going to split it equally between whoever runs? Why should the public pay for fringe campaigns that won't get any votes?
SCOTUS doesn't "attack" anything. They issue a ruling based on law. It's funny that any time there's a judicial ruling we like, it's fair and impartial, and any time there's a judicial ruling we don't like, it's judicial activism.
The other reply already makes it pretty clear why this Arizona's law violated 1A. If you want to make a legal argument that donating money to a political campaign isn't political speech, go for it. But right now it's considered protected political speech so this ruling makes perfect sense.
"Court reform" is a funny way of phrasing "ignoring the Constitution."
This isn't even a partisan issue. Harris has been on the ballot 4 months and her campaign has raised approximately 3x the amount of money Trump's has. Moneyed interests are absolutely on the side of Harris this time around.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade 2 years ago and the Chevron doctrine recently.
Do you think these judgements were both supported by the constitution when they were made and also not supported by the same constitution when overturned? Which one was the "ruling based on law"?
If there was a straight deterministic line from the laws to the rulings the court make, we would need far less courts or lawyers or highly trained judges. The fact is there are a million laws and precedents with 100 applying to any given situation in slightly different ways with many interpretations. Laws are written vaguely to keep them somewhat future-proof and leave room for interpretation/evolution. The courts do have a lot of power here.
It was Chevron deference that was overturned and it's a very important distinction. The only thing that changed was that courts were required to give deference to the agency interpretation of a statute. Now the agency needs to prove they're not misinterpreting the statute. That seems like a good change, no? Having to prove you're right in court instead of the judge being required to just assume you're right unless they're overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
Later rulings supersede previous ones because later rulings review their precedents and will correct mistakes that they identify in their precedents, so if a later ruling found those earlier rulings incorrect in their application of the law, we assume there was in fact a misjudgment in those older rulings. The justices provided legal reasoning in overturning Roe vs Wade and the Chevron doctrine, and unless you find some glaring mistake in that reasoning, the default assumption should be that the rulings to overturn these doctrines were legally sound.
> It's funny that any time there's a judicial ruling we like, it's fair and impartial, and any time there's a judicial ruling we don't like, it's judicial activism.
It is funny, but at the same time I absolutely believe that in many cases it's possible to distinguish between judgments of the activist kind and those that aren't.
Critics of SCOTUS should keep in mind that they agree unanimously more often than one might think. In fact, it's the modal outcome over all terms, with roughly third of all cases decided unanimously. IIRC 7-2 or more one-sided rulings (meaning more concurrence between all justices) occur roughly four-fifths of the time.
I was thinking more recent stuff, like fed income tax and then "giving" that money back with strings resulting in the current "we'll fund your state level EPA and DOT agencies but only if they goose step in line with us" status quo. Said status quo means that every stupid nitpick of federal law winds up getting fought tooth and nail over.
That states' rights were used to fight for the right to maintain slavery does not mean that the concept of states' rights is wrong. It is slavery that is wrong.
And on the flip side states rights is what let half the country not have slavery from the get go, certain states grant women suffrage, basically every singular "good thing" you could come up with started in one state. My state had great public healthcare before the federal mandate.
The current state of weed legalization, and research into medical psychedelic use would probably be a ton better off without the feds sticking their dick places it doesn't belong, to name but one example.
I'm inherently mistrustful of arguments for "state's rights" that don't explicitly state what rights are being advocated for, that the existence of a Federal government is standing in the way of.
It's usually something gross and regressive, like wanting to mandate Christian doctrine as law, or to reintroduce racial segregation or to send all the gays to conversion therapy. Otherwise it would be something normal they could just, you know, pass a law about. Because states do have rights, they just don't have absolute sovereignty.
There's one big reason the US can't have the same: the ruling class don't want it.
This isn't some gordian knot. We could have it tomorrow if the ruling class had their feet held to the fire. The fact that we don't is a result of the system working exactly as intended.
The richest person in the world is out in broad daylight shoveling bribes to voters as fast as he can transfer the money, and not only is he not getting arrested, he never will be. It's a dark subsection of a very dark chapter.
Too cynical and defeatist for my taste. The difference between the “ruling class” and you is that politicians know what it takes to get support from large donors. A typical Senator spends most of their day figuring that out in fact.
But at the end of the day politicians still need votes, not dollars. One way to swing the balance back would be to make support contingent on support for (and accomplishment of) popular goals.
As long as people see their chosen political party as their hometown sports team and the other political party as a bunch of demonic goblins looking to murder and imprison them and their families, that will never happen.
If you're not willing to vote for either political party to achieve your supported goals, you're part of the problem and a big part of why the country is the way it is.
A person who can't even legally own a gun due to his status as a felon is about to become commander and chief of the military. "Dark subsection" is pretty mild.
The commander-in-chief isn't leading a charge at the front lines, so whether or not he can legally own a gun has no bearing; otherwise, we'd have to demand that every elected official has direct, hands-on experience in everything that they legislate, regulate, or judge. Well, perhaps that wouldn't be so horrible, after all...
I personally find the way he came to be a felon to be a darker subsection, but your mileage may vary, of course.
I assume your point is that a felony conviction is evidence of an unsound mind that justifies prohibiting someone from owning a firearm, and that this translates to leading our military.
The analogy falls apart if said felony conviction is unjust or otherwise has no bearing on one's ability to lead the military. By and large, American voters think so, with two-thirds of those polled thinking that what he was convicted of is a nothingburger[0].
The analogy only falls apart if you are applying a double standard.
You might say "Certain kinds of felonies don't indicate a person is unfit to wield a weapon/the military, and certain kinds do." I'm a supporter of the 2A and I'd listen to that. As long as you intend to apply that across the population.
But if you're saying "A bunch of people don't like this particular conviction against this particular person, so we should have a separate standard for him," well that not how the rule of law works.
I think it would be very difficult to present an honest nonpartisan case arguing that Trump is not guilty of
1. The case he has been convicted of
2. The cases that are still in progress
3. Many things he hasn't been charged with yet.
But if you want to do so I'll try to listen. The case you listed isn't even the case he has been convicted of so far. But I don't blame you for the mixup there's so many crimes people may have trouble confusing them.
> There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way.
I’m going to push back on this.
Not a single dollar of public money should be spent helping anyone at all acquire a seat in an office of power. This includes running primaries through State election apparatuses and laws governing primary selection processes.
I’d be okay with zeroing out contributions to individual candidates and limiting political contributions exclusively to political parties to dole out to their members as they see fit, even if that required a constitutional amendment, but not with public money. You’re effectively subsidizing the acquisition of power by interested parties with taxpayer money, while simultaneously cementing an additional incumbent advantage for those already seated and able to write the rules for the public funding of elections.
I'm going to push back on this pushback. Not a single dollar of private money should be spent on helping anyone acquire a seat of power. Dollars represent disproportional ability to influence who has power.
We already have a fair mechanism to signal - voting. Attempts to nudge candidates ability to win are antithetical to our value of egalitarianism. If we're willing to let dollars donated swing a politicians chances, we've already lost. Let's just close up shop and vote with dollars like we shop for shoes. It's a mockery of decency.
Voting is just passive a passive part of politics, but there is active part of politics, like political activism, and that is as important as voting.
People that are good at public relations and communications can directly do political activism, while people bad at that and good at something else can use money generated from what they are good at to hire or support someone to do political activism for them.
So forbidding money in political activism is just gatekeeping political activism to people good at public relations.
> Dollars represent disproportional ability to influence who has power.
People with a lot of money already possess both, which is why I am perfectly content with people who have money to spend their own money.
> Attempts to nudge candidates ability to win are antithetical to our value of egalitarianism.
In that case, would you also support prohibiting people from spending their private time or using their public speech to influence election outcomes? No more volunteers, only paid workers funded by the State?
The influence of dollars alone on the outcome of an election is already overvalued. Michael Bloomberg already engaged in the grandest experiment to prove that money really can’t buy political office and depending on your point of view here, either succeeded fantastically in that goal or failed miserably in his own goal in what was fundamentally an own goal.
It’s also utterly naïve to think that by attempting to resource constrain elections by funneling money through the State to redistribute to campaigns that you will succeed in capping the real economy around election campaigns and prevent the State from giving the ultimate incumbent advantage and using its own official functions to influence the outcome of elections. More than likely you would just be hiding most of the activity around a campaign inside the State itself.
The game doesn’t change just because you’re spending public or private money: your goal is to get people to fill out their ballots and submit them in your favor. What changes is whether it is private individuals, from small dollar donors to billionaires deciding how to spend their money (as is their right in all areas of life!) or the State deciding how they are going to spend other peoples money for them, which you know, speaking of, that is a mockery of decency.
> Let's just close up shop and vote with dollars like we shop for shoes.
So let’s not and say we didn’t. The cost of converting dollars into real votes is high and plateaus. The actual spending is an entire economy supporting the salaries of campaign staff and paying contractors and advertising firms which I am okay with. I’m even okay with putting additional constraints on who can raise money and in the case of local elections, Senate and House seats, from where locking out foreigners and interstate donations entirely changing the shape of that entire economy (provided an appropriate Constitutional amendment is agreed upon and passed), but not one red cent should be coming from a local, State or the Federal Treasury. That’s money to support the functions of the State and the excess should go back to its rightful owners instead.
Outsiders like Donald Trump in 2016 and Bernie Sanders on multiple occasions also shouldn’t be able to come in an effectively (in the case of Trump) or nearly take over an existing political machine and transform it in their image at the low low cost of changing their party registration on a form with their home state.
You can do it too! In the State of California where yours truly is domiciled, changing your party registration is easier than changing your underwear so if there’s a particular party whose primary you want to vote in for whatever reason, that’s a thing you can just do with absolutely no cost to you whatsoever. You don’t need any buy-in. If political parties are going to be a thing, and we’ve accepted that they’re just going to be a thing for over 200 years and counting, then there needs to be some buy-in for people running under their banner and proportionate institutional influence from the leaders and rank-and-file of the organization flying that banner. Given freedom of association is a thing, parties are not going to go away no matter what you try and do to constrain them, so I’m okay with them also being a focal point around which people qualify for the ballot and secure donations and staffed time to run for office since that is what they are there for.
Real party turnover used to be higher. Parties would either fall out of favor and die and be replaced, or they would face credible risks from smaller parties and work to absorb them into their ranks by taking in the issues that energized them. Right now they’re functionally just an identity group, and that makes them both fragile and dangerous since their name still means something to voters, but their party functions do not command the premium they used to.
I don't care about what the organizations decide to do, that's their private business. The states shouldn't be offering them the ability to put up a candidate using a separate mechanism.
So for instance, in that scenario, the backup strategy is for there to be several candidates aligned with the organization that seek ballot access, and then the organization can endorse one of them to try to concentrate votes. Versus the situation now where the organization can name their candidate later in the process and ensure that votes are concentrated.
This would of course make things worse for 2024 Harris, but probably not to the extent that they would have for 2016 Trump.
Just so I understand because I think I might be misunderstanding you, are you against the States executing primaries on behalf of the parties, or are you against the parties gating candidates from also being on the general ticket under their name, or both?
Ah, no, I get it now and I get the sentiment but I think this is better a case where we actually lean into the party system that has developed rather than running away from it, in no small part because it isn’t going away. I still don’t think the States should be executing party primaries or running the party registration process, but I do live in a a locality with numerous officially non-partisan offices with elections that are exactly what you describe and it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I would describe it as basically a charade.
I don't see how non partisan offices relate to what I'm saying.
I don't care if candidates are endorsed by parties, claim to lead parties, whatever, I think that it is not a net benefit that established organizations play by rules that consolidate their power, that it's worth the mess for the system to not work in that direction.
Okay, well candidates already have to qualify for the ballot on their own. Being the party nominee doesn't except you from all the paperwork and petitioning that is required in pretty any jurisdiction I know of in America. Even Presidential candidates already have to qualify on a per State basis, but they have large campaigns, campaign staff in volunteers in each State that are willing to go to bat for them and dot the necessary i's and cross the necessary t's. Party machinery helps with this, but is insufficient on its own.
The main reason you don't see more people running as candidates outside their Party is because of Party discipline and the sheer cost of running national campaign. Third parties can tread water qualifying for each ballot as they come up in some States, but they have no real media presence because they're not effective at creating a real presence for themselves (and it is often off-putting in the years they can, yeah, parties can get worse).
People running outside their party as independents would be putting their political careers on the line by doing so, and not because of any kind of benefit or privilege in the law that favors parties specifically; it's because by doing so they are actively sabotaging their party's chances of winning that seat and parties don't want to keep people like that in their ranks. Add on top of that that it is expensive to even try, and it's just not worth it, although candidates that can raise more money on their own can shrug some of that party discipline off when it's a case of the party needs them more than they need the party, it's still not the norm.
As far as partisan vs non-partisan offices go, the only distinction to a voter reading their ballot is whether or not the candidate's party affiliation is listed in the text box. There is no other functional difference that matters. That's why I call it a charade.
> You’re effectively subsidizing the acquisition of power by interested parties with taxpayer money, while simultaneously cementing an additional incumbent advantage for those already seated and able to write the rules for the public funding of elections.
This is a very good point. And if we can generalize: it's very difficult to regulate something in a way that does not eventually advantage those already inside over those on the outside looking to come in; industry regulations, rent control, minimum wage, etc.
> Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
The government of the United States is both far older than Germany's Bundestag and has been far more stable over that time.
I'm not explicitly arguing one way or the other here, just calling out that I think it is a little early to say that Germany's Bundestag is a stable republic when it is so young.
We have public funding of presidential elections in the US.[1] The last year in which a major candidate accepted it was 2008, because it comes with limits on fund-raising.
Proportional representation is prone to a grid lock and fragmentation. A ranked choice looks like a good option in the situation when you don't like both major candidates (or parties) and would like to vote for 3rd one but with first-past-the-post you vote will be wasted unless you will vote for one of two the most popular candidates.
Most of the issue with PR is when your assembly has to select an executive.
But the US has a very powerful executive (the President) which sidesteps the problem. The US House of Reps could be multi party PR without any big issues (well, they might need to switch to a "last year's budget is this year's budge unless we vote to change it" model).
The reason that won't work here currently is because the two party system has people currently picking the lessor of two evils. The spectrum of stances within a single party is extremely wide since all cobinations of views must fit within two parties. For example, compare a NYC Democrat candidate vs a WV Democrat candidate. Or a republican candidate from TX vs one from NJ.
"There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way."
I sort of agree. Instead of all these commercials and flyers, it would be much better if every candidate gets a page on a government website where they can advertise their views and platform. It would be similar to how specimen ballots are available online today. Restrictions like that would remove much of the influence of money.
> Neither system is perfect, but the latter captures a wider range of views within society.
In the FPTP system in the US, you end up with two "big tent" parties with broadly opposing views. What makes you suggest that this model does not sufficiently capture the width of views within society?
> Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
There is a lot to admire about Germany, but that vaunted stable constitutional federal republic just about committed economic suicide via an over-reliance on cheap Russian gas and zealous persecution of domestic nuclear. It now has the weakest prospects among its peer nations. Their governing model isn't a guarantee of good decisions.
It doesn't capture the width of views precisely because of the "big tent" parties. When a political party is united and effective, it functions as a weighted average of its representatives. When it's not, it loses power and makes other parties stronger.
If your opinions are outside the mainstream of any party, you will not have genuine representation in any democratic system, where political parties are allowed to form. Some outlier representative may speak in favor of policies you support, but they would be equally effective as an extra-parliamentary activist.
There is public funding of elections in the U.S. You can even check a box on your tax return to have part of your tax go toward funding elections. (This affects where $3 of the tax associated with you is budgeted by the federal government; it doesn't affect your tax liability/refund.)
According to the IRS, fewer than 4% of people check this box.
Germany affords no Freedom of Speech and makes major policy blunders, like shutting off all of its nuclear power plants. It's not a country for the US to emulate.
> Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
Germany's second most popular party is labeled a "suspected extremist group", there are discussions of banning it altogether, and the entire rest of the political establishment unites to ensure they are kept out of actual power.
When you even have a second-most-popular party that can be labeled an extremist group, I'm not going to call you a "stable" country. In general, the feature of parliamentary democracies where the "wrong" election runner-up is totally shut out also makes it seem not any different in practice than the US system. It's nice that the "right" runner-ups will be a part of a governing coalition, but this is also already effectively the way the US works, as party discipline is not nearly as strong.
Democratic institutions are a problem throughout the west right now, and I would definitely not be looking at Germany as a model. Not sure who would be. People say good things about Swiss governance, but I don't know enough of the situation there.
Lol, Germany was bought and paid for decades ago and the party with the most political power is the Hells Angels. They even got their rivals federally banned, even though they are not!
You read like a HAMC damage control bot. I am sick of being lorded over by criminals hiding in plain sight, it is why the economy sucks. They are sucking on it like leeches.
The simple fact that you can spend $1 in Meta ads to raise $1.02 in political contributions, at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, is fueling political campaigns.
Maybe 10 years ago there was a contentious Senate race here in my state. They spent tons of money courting voters, with ads in all kinds of media and a non-stop brigade of earnest young people (volunteers? paid?) going door to door and harassing people who hadn't voted early.
This year is somewhat similar, except the local media market is dead and a lions share of the money is going to 2 tech companies. I read they took 78% in the 2020 election cycle. You can guess which 2 companies those are.
Anyone else noticed the election has trashed your ad budgets? Doing CPC and CPM when suddenly hundreds of millions are being dumped across the board kinda sucks.
Yeah really hurt branding/prospecting - haven’t seen the impact for retargeting yet since I run super high bids there but surely will be affected soon.
Wish my employer took on political clients - such easy free money.
The least competitive races in America are in Los Angeles and New York. They’re not advertising presidential candidates there to court voters. The votes don’t matter. They want a $25 donation, that they’ll plow $20 of back into more ads, and pocket $5 on overhead.
Question for historians... Was there a time in the US that preying upon the elderly for political campaign funding like this would've been met with universal (both sides of the aisle) outrage, and probably cost the parties doing it many elections?
One of those crap jobs I had when I was young was a temp worker in a lock box that processed political contributions (early 90's). There would be trays of mail coming in from various campaigns, for various orgs (3 or 4, both Democratic and Repubican). Surveys were big -- and people would write all over them. But the first thing that happened was the money was pulled out and deposited. The bundles of surveys might have been looked at.
It was depressing as hell. You could tell people were looking for someone to listen. And as far as I know, they only reached someone doing a buck over minimum wage, who had to process x hundred envelopes per hour.
Now, of course, it's been streamlined -- there aren't checks anymore so it's all that much faster for the more efficient clearing of the marks money.
Some legitimately discarded I'm sure, but some were thrown out because a human thought the signature was off. And who knows if they got it right:
strictly scrutinized the ballots that were returned, and often did not even notify absentee voters that their ballot was rejected because of an administrative deficiency
Plus this type of thing happens all the time (happened to me this year in a different state):
Endless political spam texts are infuriating enough even for the mentally fit. I actively advise people against making political donations now unless they're extremely careful about it, because they will be hounded by political groups for literally the rest of their lives (literally literally, not figuratively literally) if they ever share any kind of contact information.
This year when I checked my voter registration I noticed that the “phone number” field in my profile was not marked as required, and there was a little info icon that said “this is public information” when I clicked on it.
I removed my phone number and the number of text messages diminished (not all the way, but noticeably better). Not a magic bullet, but worth checking.
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies only to "commercial" messages. Political ads are technically exempt, as a free speech issue. But because political ads go out via the usual SMS spam services, STOP usually works anyway. The services don't want their outgoing lines blocked.
I interact with wealthy retired elderly people every day. Yes, they are the #1 prey in our society. They are so harassed. Like wildebeests getting nibbled on by a pack of jackals.
they don't even need to be wealth just lonely. My father in law lives on the other side of the country far away from any family. He has been giving every spare dollar to a con artist that has got him convinced they are going to get millions of dollars from the government but inevitably something gets in the way and the con artist need a little more money for them to finally get it... He has bounced between menial jobs as long as i and my wife have been together, before we had kid we tried to get him to come live here but he refused because he was so convinced he was going to soon be a millionaire. he is otherwise able to take care of himself is emotionally/mentally stable but wont listen to any one that says he is being scammed because the only person that is near him who talks to him is the one conning him.
Governments seem very focused on protecting people from easy-to-address, low-harm activities like website tracking and spam, but wholly unconcerned with scams and theft (which I consider much more harmful).
There used to be a time when retired US politicians with decades of service were still respected in retirement. Granted, this was before Gingrich's hyperpoliticizing of every bit of minutiae in America.
Then Fred Thompson, not satisfied with his $250K an hour lobbying gig or his acting career, decided he also needed to start hawking reverse mortgages to the elderly, and that was a wrap. Before people were willing to look past the lobbying... stopped being a thing after ole Fred was caught on TV and radio right next to the gold bouillon sellers.
One of the pieces of history I didn’t appreciate at the time, because I was just a kid: Bork was Solicitor General in the Nixon administration. When Nixon ordered that his AG fire the Special Prosecutor investigating Watergate, Nixon’s appointed AG and deputy (very ethically) resigned instead. This left Bork as acting AG, and unlike his superiors, Bork was very happy to fire the Special Prosecutor at his boss’s request. In other words, almost everyone in the Nixon administration had more ethics than Bork.
What was so disgusting and surprising about the Bork nomination is that it was clearly a reward for that behavior, one that persisted across multiple presidential terms. It sent a message that “no matter how damaging your lack of ethics might seem in the short term, there is a reward for loyalty and willingness to short-circuit the criminal process” that would have felt at home in an organized crime family. The stuff we see today is just a further development of the metastasizing cancer that began right there.
I disagree. For one, Bork had already been refused a seat on the Supreme Court. Secondly, it's the first time that a mainstream political party ever succeeded in "othering" another group of straight white capitalists purely with propaganda.
Everyone forgets that the DNC forced out FDR's two-time VP for being too buddy-buddy with socialism, giving us Truman and a half century of the ultimate in hyperpartisanship (the kind with Nukes of Damocles hanging over everyone's heads).
One of my good friends is, in his words, older than oxygen. He lives across the street in a senior’s home and I always saw him out for walks.
I have a rule - when I see someone enough for them to become a familiar, I introduce myself. So I introduced myself to him and now he sends me a text message a few times a month for a coffee.
He was getting close to getting reined in by a scam. It was a Canadian party pulling the same shit as MAGA.
He said something really interesting.
You’re young and nobody listens to you. You just get dragged around, told where to go and what to say. Then, you hit around 40 and suddenly everyone listens to you. They will stop what they’re doing to cater to you. But then you turn really old, your wife dies and all of a sudden, you have nobody to even drag you around. You’re totally by yourself and day to day, it doesn’t matter if you live or die.
He knew it was a scam and knew when it got too expensive so decided to walk. But it was human contact. And as he says, loneliness is worse than being broke.
The best part of being friends with him is how the staff treats me at our spot. It’s a pub he used to go to with his wife when she was alive and the entire staff knows him very well.
Whenever we have coffee, one of the servers inevitably looks at him, points at me and says “Ray, I see you’re doing your good deed for the day.”
Without fail, his eyes twinkle and he replies, “If I don’t teach this young peckerhead a thing or two, we’re all doomed.”
I’m not sure there is a moral, but if you happen to see an older adult regularly, stop and talk. You may protect them from scams. You may end up with a close friend. If you’re really lucky, you may even get called “peckerhead.”
He implies he got involved with this Canadian MAGA type party because no one listens to him. How does that make you, someone who sits down with him regularly and listens, feel?
I bring this up because in my experience, people are rarely honest about why they support such politics/politicians.
Not just that demographic, every demographic. There was a Planet Money podcast episode just the other day called The Subscription Trap. The podcast host and the founders of this tool, all seemingly young, tech enabled people all had hundreds (if not thousands) in unknown subscriptions. It's a problem top to bottom.
> tech enabled people all had hundreds (if not thousands) in unknown subscriptions
I don't really understand how people can't easily see this on their CC bill(s). You don't even need to check monthly, just every so often and make sure you recognize all the charges.
They don't (have to) care. At least in America, the vast majority of people have never felt the pinch of being "broke"-broke. When you have money coming in, you have enough to waste on dumb stuff. Going off my own list: $100/m phone bills when $15/m ones are available (even less, because employee discount!)? Well, it's more convenient (it wasn't, it was just money getting shoveled into the trash). Eating out at lunch? Making food is a chore (actually, stew pots are your friend, Panda Express is not). $200/m for a storage unit isn't reasonable. Neither is a new car note. Overspending on insurance. Monthly media subscriptions. On and on. You don't realize it until the money simply isn't there anymore, and you're forced to make cuts. And it's at that point that you realize, "Dang, I could have had a lot less stress now if I'd been more vigilant about spending money I didn't need to - if I'd just known better - then." But the entire economy essentially encourages and then preys on your apathy and lack of knowledge.^1
By the time you see what's going on, it's too late. You're a bum and no one cares about what you have to say.
1: Actually, this is not in and of itself a bad thing. "Stupid" purchasing decisions keeps artists and artisans in food and home, is the "slack" that keeps labor inefficient enough to be tolerable. The problem is twofold: 1) that corporations systematically prey on this tendency, and 2) its distribution as an ability is lopsided: most people can be extremely frivolous with money, and some can't be frivolous at all, and there's very little middle ground.
Everything you said is 'known' though. The quote I referenced said 'unknown'. I know I overpay for cell service because it works for me and I don't want to risk is not working where I need it to work. That's different than if I had a second cell plan that I didn't even know about and was still paying for.
I am always shocked at the number of people who don't balance and reconcile their accounts each month. I go through each of our accounts at least monthly and compare each financial org's ideas of our transactions with our own record. I cannot fathom not doing this. And yet, people look at my like I'm nuts when the subject comes up.
Sometimes they err in our favor and I still try to have it fixed, expecting that eventually they'll figure it out and try to claw the money back. Goldman Sachs gave us about $200 earlier this year. It went something like this:
- Starting balance: $1000
- We paid: $700
- New charges: $300
- End balance: $400
I spent a couple hours on the phone trying to get them to realize their arithmetic was wrong. I finally insisted that guy I was talking to pull up a calculator, punch in the numbers, and see for himself. "Let's see, $1000 minus $700 is $300, plus $300 is $600, so... wait, why did we tell you $400?" "I don't know!" I even escalated to their audit department who said their math all checks out that I only owed them $400 instead of $600. I am certain to my core that someday they're going to ask for that $200 plus interest.
One possible idea is to simply publicly fund the political parties and do away with political donations entirely.
They're an essential part of your democratic system of government and could therefore be considered an essential service, so they would be funded in the same way as any other essential service.
That would not only solve this problem but also prevent the corporate lobbyists from having too much influence and corrupting the system.
Hopefully it'll be capped and that will mean less ads everywhere.
> One possible idea is to simply publicly fund the political parties and do away with political donations entirely.
No, political parties should be abolished. People can get together, call themselves whatever they want, and recommend people as candidates for office, but these private organizations should not be institutionalized in law or supported in any way. We shouldn't even be helping with their primaries.
Law shouldn't recognize anything called a "political party" or have any rules governing them. They are not essential, they are corrupting.
Most laws regulating political parties came about to enforce civil rights. The political parties when left to their own devices engaged in discriminatory practices, which effectively excluded large swathes of people from core parts of the democratic process.
Terrible, self-indulgent page design. That aside, my parents are around 80 and while neither is showing signs of dementia, dad readily admits he's not as sharp as he used to be. Mom is in denial. For their ages, they're doing pretty well. As far as I know, neither has been victims of scams but it troubles me when I'm at their house and see things like "Congratulations! You just won $10,000" banner ads blinking on their monitors and tablets. Maybe I should set up some kind of network wide ad blocking for them but in general I try not to be intrusive on how they run their lives. I know the day will come when they're not able to and it worries me that my siblings and I might not see it before it's too late. Medical science has done many wonderful things for helping people live longer but it seems more common for our physical bodies to outlive our minds. In that period, there's lots of room for exploitation.
I don't want this come across the wrong way, but have you tried talking to them about scams, or what they see in the banner ads? It might give you an idea of how credulous they are.
My parents are in a similar age group, and I frequently share information about scams with them. I don't expect all the information to stick, but it just keeps re-enforcing the ideas of 'no free lunches', 'too good to be true', 'pressured to act quickly' etc.
If they aren't already using a password manager with an emergency access feature, get them set up with one. As an example, if you use Bitwarden then get a family plan and add them to it - that allows setting an emergency contact who can access or take over the account if needed. 1Password and other competitors should all also have this.
The other thing you might do is have their banking and credit card accounts set up to email you transaction notifications - that's obviously more intrusive, but it should let you catch repeating suspicious transactions.
Having seen both of my parents develop dementia at different rates, I'll say that yes it does sneak up. There wasn't a clear day where yesterday they were self-sufficient and now they are not.
It is natural for the sufferer to develop coping mechanisms hide problems from themselves and others. The problems have to grow until the coping mechanisms start to collapse, and then suddenly they are much more evident. Another aspect is the child's denial. It is a significant shift in your worldview to see a parent go from being self-sufficient to dependent. To recognize the myriad day to day functions you took for granted that now require a caregiver's involvement.
Also, the cognitive problems do not develop as a slow and continuous trend. There are different cycles overlaid with seasons, illnesses, and even time of day. So you see fluctuations in their capacity and returning moments of lucidity and function help sustain denial.
I've heard it said, and I agree, the process of caring for someone with dementia includes a grieving process with all the complexities that ever has. You are watching many layers of the person die, sometimes over and over. At times you are faced with the living husk of the person you remember. Or worse, a strange subset of their prior personality traits and memories.
It can take a crisis to force the issue, if families get stuck in denial. Sadly, this also makes later caregiver arrangements more difficult. As far as I can tell, the happiest dementia sufferers seem to be ones who were able to transition into a supportive care environment before they progressed too far, so they had the capacity to adapt and familiarize themselves to new routines. Those routines help them cope in later phases. Those who go down kicking and screaming may be stuck with a care environment that seems (to them) threatening and disorienting.
Everyone really needs to have an up-to-date Power Of Attorney Directive and a trusted agent who can act on their behalf once they lose their cognitive ability and financial judgment.
This is from experience. You should take control of their banking accounts and home ownership now not later. Go to the bank with your parents and tell the bank you need to be added to their account. Talk with a lawyer or nonprofit and figure out how to add your name so your parents cannot literally sign their house away to a con artist.
You must realize that dementia patients aren't blank canvases and their delusions are based on the people they were before the disease struck. If you don't work on yourself before its too late, then you will be exposed by the disease. It's not difficult to understand.
I am very sympathetic to this. However, much of that hate is born of fear. When some sociopath deliberately and systematically tells old people that various "they" are coming for them, can we really blame the ones that react in terror with the hope that someone will protect them?
Dementia is an excuse. It may be the only excuse. If someone isn't thinking clearly, we can't get mad at them for not thinking clearly.
Fear is not an excuse and I’m not mad at them. Actions have consequences and ignorance is no excuse for people causing harm. They no longer should be allowed to exert influence if they don’t have agency. They must be handled in a way that is beneficial to society overall, and one way is to stop making excuses for them and act to remove their destructive capabilities.
There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way.
If we really want reform, the system should be changed from a first-past-the-post presidential system to a parliamentary system with party-list proportional representation. Neither system is perfect, but the latter captures a wider range of views within society.
Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has been systematically attacking all attempts to limit private campaign finance, including public funding.
In 2011, in Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett, they ruled that a program that Arizona established which would give campaigns that opted out of private financing public financing matching their competitors financing infringed on the First Amendment speech rights of the privately financed campaign.
That's right, matching private campaign spending with public funding violates the free speech of the privately funded campaign, because it removes their advantage.
The solution to campaign finance needs to start and end with court reform, or it's DOA.
Exactly what reforms do you want? If you want first amendment restrictions you can look into passing another amendment. That's really how that's supposed to work. The logic behind the ruling is fine if you actually dig into it - funding is speech, government funding of some candidates and not others dilutes the speech of some citizens and effectively compels speech from other citizens through the government. A better approach would be restricting all political advertising to some government provided platform. This would avoid the wasteful government matching.
That line of logic is utterly insane even at a glance because it argues that citizens cannot be taxed for something they don’t support.
Shall we ask the DEA when they’ll be issuing refunds?
“Diluting” speech is equally incoherent. The presidents state of the nation address drags people away from my Twitter feed, so the government is diluting my speech. If the argument is just that the government can’t do anything that would make a citizen less heard, the government ceases to function because practically everything they do is more consequential than any citizens opinion.
The First Amendment doesn’t even say anything about being heard. It is a right to speak, not a right to be heard. Funding a candidate does not remove the right or ability for other candidates to speak.
> A better approach would be restricting all political advertising to some government provided platform.
This is not even close to passing even a cursory First Amendment analysis. Telling people they can’t advertise on Facebook/Google/etc is absolutely a First Amendment issue. It is literal speech, and the right to express it is abridged by location. This will never happen without an amendment.
The better solution is to continue respecting the First Amendment and not trying to restrict in any way, political speech, and instead reforming the electoral system so that the volume of speech one is able to output through the expenditure of financial resources does not have an impact on election outcomes.
The Supreme Court is defending the First Amendment, and "court reform" is a euphemism for eliminating the independence of the judiciary in order to dismantle those First Amendment protections.
Supreme Court justices are taking bribes to deliver outcomes their cronies want, and "court reform" is a euphemism for holding justices selling our country accountable.
That was a good decision, because the rule creates a negative responsiveness paradox. Spending money to support your preferred candidate should not make opposing candidates stronger.
That was the effect of Arizona's rule: money spent to promote a candidate was matched by free public money, which the opposing candidate did not have exert any effort to obtain.
Good voting systems minimize this effect. The US first-past-the-post system is not a good voting system, but that's no excuse for making it worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_responsiveness_parado...
Why should money be involved in supporting a candidate? Doesn’t the democratic action of voting do that?
Yard signs, phone calls, websites, GOTV operations, consultants, debates, mailers, all of these things cost money. The current system requires you to appeal to donors with a winning message to get contributions to pay for these.
Who decides which candidates get limited public funds? Are you just going to split it equally between whoever runs? Why should the public pay for fringe campaigns that won't get any votes?
Usually you do a poll and set a threshold for funding, like 5% or something, to avoid funding fringe candidates.
SCOTUS doesn't "attack" anything. They issue a ruling based on law. It's funny that any time there's a judicial ruling we like, it's fair and impartial, and any time there's a judicial ruling we don't like, it's judicial activism.
The other reply already makes it pretty clear why this Arizona's law violated 1A. If you want to make a legal argument that donating money to a political campaign isn't political speech, go for it. But right now it's considered protected political speech so this ruling makes perfect sense.
"Court reform" is a funny way of phrasing "ignoring the Constitution."
This isn't even a partisan issue. Harris has been on the ballot 4 months and her campaign has raised approximately 3x the amount of money Trump's has. Moneyed interests are absolutely on the side of Harris this time around.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade 2 years ago and the Chevron doctrine recently.
Do you think these judgements were both supported by the constitution when they were made and also not supported by the same constitution when overturned? Which one was the "ruling based on law"?
If there was a straight deterministic line from the laws to the rulings the court make, we would need far less courts or lawyers or highly trained judges. The fact is there are a million laws and precedents with 100 applying to any given situation in slightly different ways with many interpretations. Laws are written vaguely to keep them somewhat future-proof and leave room for interpretation/evolution. The courts do have a lot of power here.
It was Chevron deference that was overturned and it's a very important distinction. The only thing that changed was that courts were required to give deference to the agency interpretation of a statute. Now the agency needs to prove they're not misinterpreting the statute. That seems like a good change, no? Having to prove you're right in court instead of the judge being required to just assume you're right unless they're overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
Later rulings supersede previous ones because later rulings review their precedents and will correct mistakes that they identify in their precedents, so if a later ruling found those earlier rulings incorrect in their application of the law, we assume there was in fact a misjudgment in those older rulings. The justices provided legal reasoning in overturning Roe vs Wade and the Chevron doctrine, and unless you find some glaring mistake in that reasoning, the default assumption should be that the rulings to overturn these doctrines were legally sound.
> It's funny that any time there's a judicial ruling we like, it's fair and impartial, and any time there's a judicial ruling we don't like, it's judicial activism.
It is funny, but at the same time I absolutely believe that in many cases it's possible to distinguish between judgments of the activist kind and those that aren't.
Critics of SCOTUS should keep in mind that they agree unanimously more often than one might think. In fact, it's the modal outcome over all terms, with roughly third of all cases decided unanimously. IIRC 7-2 or more one-sided rulings (meaning more concurrence between all justices) occur roughly four-fifths of the time.
Truth.
The courts have become more / too important as Congress has become more ineffectual.
Congress wouldn't matter as much if the feds hadn't spend 200yr usurping so much power from the states.
well the states really kind of blew it when they chose slavery as the hill to literally die on, didn't they?
it's not like this is all on Congress..
I was thinking more recent stuff, like fed income tax and then "giving" that money back with strings resulting in the current "we'll fund your state level EPA and DOT agencies but only if they goose step in line with us" status quo. Said status quo means that every stupid nitpick of federal law winds up getting fought tooth and nail over.
That states' rights were used to fight for the right to maintain slavery does not mean that the concept of states' rights is wrong. It is slavery that is wrong.
It's more that states don't really do things better than federal.
It was also used as an argument to fight for Jim Crow laws. So called "States rights" have a very ugly history in America
And on the flip side states rights is what let half the country not have slavery from the get go, certain states grant women suffrage, basically every singular "good thing" you could come up with started in one state. My state had great public healthcare before the federal mandate.
The current state of weed legalization, and research into medical psychedelic use would probably be a ton better off without the feds sticking their dick places it doesn't belong, to name but one example.
I'm inherently mistrustful of arguments for "state's rights" that don't explicitly state what rights are being advocated for, that the existence of a Federal government is standing in the way of.
It's usually something gross and regressive, like wanting to mandate Christian doctrine as law, or to reintroduce racial segregation or to send all the gays to conversion therapy. Otherwise it would be something normal they could just, you know, pass a law about. Because states do have rights, they just don't have absolute sovereignty.
> No reason why the US can't have the same.
There's one big reason the US can't have the same: the ruling class don't want it.
This isn't some gordian knot. We could have it tomorrow if the ruling class had their feet held to the fire. The fact that we don't is a result of the system working exactly as intended.
The richest person in the world is out in broad daylight shoveling bribes to voters as fast as he can transfer the money, and not only is he not getting arrested, he never will be. It's a dark subsection of a very dark chapter.
> the ruling class don't want it
Too cynical and defeatist for my taste. The difference between the “ruling class” and you is that politicians know what it takes to get support from large donors. A typical Senator spends most of their day figuring that out in fact.
But at the end of the day politicians still need votes, not dollars. One way to swing the balance back would be to make support contingent on support for (and accomplishment of) popular goals.
As long as people see their chosen political party as their hometown sports team and the other political party as a bunch of demonic goblins looking to murder and imprison them and their families, that will never happen.
If you're not willing to vote for either political party to achieve your supported goals, you're part of the problem and a big part of why the country is the way it is.
A person who can't even legally own a gun due to his status as a felon is about to become commander and chief of the military. "Dark subsection" is pretty mild.
This could be seen as protection for candidates against lawfare, which is widely used in tyrannical governments.
I mean, of all the reasons to oppose Trump being commander in chief, much less President, that seems the least relevant.
The commander-in-chief isn't leading a charge at the front lines, so whether or not he can legally own a gun has no bearing; otherwise, we'd have to demand that every elected official has direct, hands-on experience in everything that they legislate, regulate, or judge. Well, perhaps that wouldn't be so horrible, after all...
I personally find the way he came to be a felon to be a darker subsection, but your mileage may vary, of course.
What you are missing about the analogy is that the US military is effectively the largest gun on the planet.
I assume your point is that a felony conviction is evidence of an unsound mind that justifies prohibiting someone from owning a firearm, and that this translates to leading our military.
The analogy falls apart if said felony conviction is unjust or otherwise has no bearing on one's ability to lead the military. By and large, American voters think so, with two-thirds of those polled thinking that what he was convicted of is a nothingburger[0].
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-indictment-hush-money...
The analogy only falls apart if you are applying a double standard.
You might say "Certain kinds of felonies don't indicate a person is unfit to wield a weapon/the military, and certain kinds do." I'm a supporter of the 2A and I'd listen to that. As long as you intend to apply that across the population.
But if you're saying "A bunch of people don't like this particular conviction against this particular person, so we should have a separate standard for him," well that not how the rule of law works.
What is a presidential pardon then? Maybe not how rule of law works but it's how democracy works.
I think it would be very difficult to present an honest nonpartisan case arguing that Trump is not guilty of
1. The case he has been convicted of 2. The cases that are still in progress 3. Many things he hasn't been charged with yet.
But if you want to do so I'll try to listen. The case you listed isn't even the case he has been convicted of so far. But I don't blame you for the mixup there's so many crimes people may have trouble confusing them.
> There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way.
I’m going to push back on this.
Not a single dollar of public money should be spent helping anyone at all acquire a seat in an office of power. This includes running primaries through State election apparatuses and laws governing primary selection processes.
I’d be okay with zeroing out contributions to individual candidates and limiting political contributions exclusively to political parties to dole out to their members as they see fit, even if that required a constitutional amendment, but not with public money. You’re effectively subsidizing the acquisition of power by interested parties with taxpayer money, while simultaneously cementing an additional incumbent advantage for those already seated and able to write the rules for the public funding of elections.
I'm going to push back on this pushback. Not a single dollar of private money should be spent on helping anyone acquire a seat of power. Dollars represent disproportional ability to influence who has power.
We already have a fair mechanism to signal - voting. Attempts to nudge candidates ability to win are antithetical to our value of egalitarianism. If we're willing to let dollars donated swing a politicians chances, we've already lost. Let's just close up shop and vote with dollars like we shop for shoes. It's a mockery of decency.
Voting is just passive a passive part of politics, but there is active part of politics, like political activism, and that is as important as voting.
People that are good at public relations and communications can directly do political activism, while people bad at that and good at something else can use money generated from what they are good at to hire or support someone to do political activism for them.
So forbidding money in political activism is just gatekeeping political activism to people good at public relations.
> Dollars represent disproportional ability to influence who has power.
People with a lot of money already possess both, which is why I am perfectly content with people who have money to spend their own money.
> Attempts to nudge candidates ability to win are antithetical to our value of egalitarianism.
In that case, would you also support prohibiting people from spending their private time or using their public speech to influence election outcomes? No more volunteers, only paid workers funded by the State?
The influence of dollars alone on the outcome of an election is already overvalued. Michael Bloomberg already engaged in the grandest experiment to prove that money really can’t buy political office and depending on your point of view here, either succeeded fantastically in that goal or failed miserably in his own goal in what was fundamentally an own goal.
It’s also utterly naïve to think that by attempting to resource constrain elections by funneling money through the State to redistribute to campaigns that you will succeed in capping the real economy around election campaigns and prevent the State from giving the ultimate incumbent advantage and using its own official functions to influence the outcome of elections. More than likely you would just be hiding most of the activity around a campaign inside the State itself.
The game doesn’t change just because you’re spending public or private money: your goal is to get people to fill out their ballots and submit them in your favor. What changes is whether it is private individuals, from small dollar donors to billionaires deciding how to spend their money (as is their right in all areas of life!) or the State deciding how they are going to spend other peoples money for them, which you know, speaking of, that is a mockery of decency.
> Let's just close up shop and vote with dollars like we shop for shoes.
So let’s not and say we didn’t. The cost of converting dollars into real votes is high and plateaus. The actual spending is an entire economy supporting the salaries of campaign staff and paying contractors and advertising firms which I am okay with. I’m even okay with putting additional constraints on who can raise money and in the case of local elections, Senate and House seats, from where locking out foreigners and interstate donations entirely changing the shape of that entire economy (provided an appropriate Constitutional amendment is agreed upon and passed), but not one red cent should be coming from a local, State or the Federal Treasury. That’s money to support the functions of the State and the excess should go back to its rightful owners instead.
There probably shouldn't be privileged ballot access where well established organizations have a lower bar than a newcomer.
Outsiders like Donald Trump in 2016 and Bernie Sanders on multiple occasions also shouldn’t be able to come in an effectively (in the case of Trump) or nearly take over an existing political machine and transform it in their image at the low low cost of changing their party registration on a form with their home state.
You can do it too! In the State of California where yours truly is domiciled, changing your party registration is easier than changing your underwear so if there’s a particular party whose primary you want to vote in for whatever reason, that’s a thing you can just do with absolutely no cost to you whatsoever. You don’t need any buy-in. If political parties are going to be a thing, and we’ve accepted that they’re just going to be a thing for over 200 years and counting, then there needs to be some buy-in for people running under their banner and proportionate institutional influence from the leaders and rank-and-file of the organization flying that banner. Given freedom of association is a thing, parties are not going to go away no matter what you try and do to constrain them, so I’m okay with them also being a focal point around which people qualify for the ballot and secure donations and staffed time to run for office since that is what they are there for.
Real party turnover used to be higher. Parties would either fall out of favor and die and be replaced, or they would face credible risks from smaller parties and work to absorb them into their ranks by taking in the issues that energized them. Right now they’re functionally just an identity group, and that makes them both fragile and dangerous since their name still means something to voters, but their party functions do not command the premium they used to.
I don't care about what the organizations decide to do, that's their private business. The states shouldn't be offering them the ability to put up a candidate using a separate mechanism.
So for instance, in that scenario, the backup strategy is for there to be several candidates aligned with the organization that seek ballot access, and then the organization can endorse one of them to try to concentrate votes. Versus the situation now where the organization can name their candidate later in the process and ensure that votes are concentrated.
This would of course make things worse for 2024 Harris, but probably not to the extent that they would have for 2016 Trump.
Just so I understand because I think I might be misunderstanding you, are you against the States executing primaries on behalf of the parties, or are you against the parties gating candidates from also being on the general ticket under their name, or both?
There shouldn't be ballot access for a party nominee. I would be fine with the party endorsement of a given candidate still appearing on the ballot.
It's not a gate, it's privileged access, where organizations that pass some rule play by different rules than other candidates.
Ah, no, I get it now and I get the sentiment but I think this is better a case where we actually lean into the party system that has developed rather than running away from it, in no small part because it isn’t going away. I still don’t think the States should be executing party primaries or running the party registration process, but I do live in a a locality with numerous officially non-partisan offices with elections that are exactly what you describe and it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I would describe it as basically a charade.
I don't see how non partisan offices relate to what I'm saying.
I don't care if candidates are endorsed by parties, claim to lead parties, whatever, I think that it is not a net benefit that established organizations play by rules that consolidate their power, that it's worth the mess for the system to not work in that direction.
Okay, well candidates already have to qualify for the ballot on their own. Being the party nominee doesn't except you from all the paperwork and petitioning that is required in pretty any jurisdiction I know of in America. Even Presidential candidates already have to qualify on a per State basis, but they have large campaigns, campaign staff in volunteers in each State that are willing to go to bat for them and dot the necessary i's and cross the necessary t's. Party machinery helps with this, but is insufficient on its own.
The main reason you don't see more people running as candidates outside their Party is because of Party discipline and the sheer cost of running national campaign. Third parties can tread water qualifying for each ballot as they come up in some States, but they have no real media presence because they're not effective at creating a real presence for themselves (and it is often off-putting in the years they can, yeah, parties can get worse).
People running outside their party as independents would be putting their political careers on the line by doing so, and not because of any kind of benefit or privilege in the law that favors parties specifically; it's because by doing so they are actively sabotaging their party's chances of winning that seat and parties don't want to keep people like that in their ranks. Add on top of that that it is expensive to even try, and it's just not worth it, although candidates that can raise more money on their own can shrug some of that party discipline off when it's a case of the party needs them more than they need the party, it's still not the norm.
As far as partisan vs non-partisan offices go, the only distinction to a voter reading their ballot is whether or not the candidate's party affiliation is listed in the text box. There is no other functional difference that matters. That's why I call it a charade.
The rules are different for 'established party' (or so) candidates in a whole lot of places. Less signatures, exceptions, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_access
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_major_and_minor_pa...
> You’re effectively subsidizing the acquisition of power by interested parties with taxpayer money, while simultaneously cementing an additional incumbent advantage for those already seated and able to write the rules for the public funding of elections.
This is a very good point. And if we can generalize: it's very difficult to regulate something in a way that does not eventually advantage those already inside over those on the outside looking to come in; industry regulations, rent control, minimum wage, etc.
> Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
The government of the United States is both far older than Germany's Bundestag and has been far more stable over that time.
I'm not explicitly arguing one way or the other here, just calling out that I think it is a little early to say that Germany's Bundestag is a stable republic when it is so young.
We have public funding of presidential elections in the US.[1] The last year in which a major candidate accepted it was 2008, because it comes with limits on fund-raising.
[1] https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/understand...
Proportional representation is prone to a grid lock and fragmentation. A ranked choice looks like a good option in the situation when you don't like both major candidates (or parties) and would like to vote for 3rd one but with first-past-the-post you vote will be wasted unless you will vote for one of two the most popular candidates.
Most of the issue with PR is when your assembly has to select an executive.
But the US has a very powerful executive (the President) which sidesteps the problem. The US House of Reps could be multi party PR without any big issues (well, they might need to switch to a "last year's budget is this year's budge unless we vote to change it" model).
"No reason why the US can't have the same."
The reason that won't work here currently is because the two party system has people currently picking the lessor of two evils. The spectrum of stances within a single party is extremely wide since all cobinations of views must fit within two parties. For example, compare a NYC Democrat candidate vs a WV Democrat candidate. Or a republican candidate from TX vs one from NJ.
"There needs to be public funding of elections. That would go a long way."
I sort of agree. Instead of all these commercials and flyers, it would be much better if every candidate gets a page on a government website where they can advertise their views and platform. It would be similar to how specimen ballots are available online today. Restrictions like that would remove much of the influence of money.
> Neither system is perfect, but the latter captures a wider range of views within society.
In the FPTP system in the US, you end up with two "big tent" parties with broadly opposing views. What makes you suggest that this model does not sufficiently capture the width of views within society?
> Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
There is a lot to admire about Germany, but that vaunted stable constitutional federal republic just about committed economic suicide via an over-reliance on cheap Russian gas and zealous persecution of domestic nuclear. It now has the weakest prospects among its peer nations. Their governing model isn't a guarantee of good decisions.
It doesn't capture the width of views precisely because of the "big tent" parties. When a political party is united and effective, it functions as a weighted average of its representatives. When it's not, it loses power and makes other parties stronger.
If your opinions are outside the mainstream of any party, you will not have genuine representation in any democratic system, where political parties are allowed to form. Some outlier representative may speak in favor of policies you support, but they would be equally effective as an extra-parliamentary activist.
Sortition.
There is public funding of elections in the U.S. You can even check a box on your tax return to have part of your tax go toward funding elections. (This affects where $3 of the tax associated with you is budgeted by the federal government; it doesn't affect your tax liability/refund.)
According to the IRS, fewer than 4% of people check this box.
Germany affords no Freedom of Speech and makes major policy blunders, like shutting off all of its nuclear power plants. It's not a country for the US to emulate.
> Germany is a stable constitutional federal republic with proportional representation and power vested in the Bundestag. No reason why the US can't have the same.
Germany's second most popular party is labeled a "suspected extremist group", there are discussions of banning it altogether, and the entire rest of the political establishment unites to ensure they are kept out of actual power.
When you even have a second-most-popular party that can be labeled an extremist group, I'm not going to call you a "stable" country. In general, the feature of parliamentary democracies where the "wrong" election runner-up is totally shut out also makes it seem not any different in practice than the US system. It's nice that the "right" runner-ups will be a part of a governing coalition, but this is also already effectively the way the US works, as party discipline is not nearly as strong.
Democratic institutions are a problem throughout the west right now, and I would definitely not be looking at Germany as a model. Not sure who would be. People say good things about Swiss governance, but I don't know enough of the situation there.
Ah yes, Germany, the most stable, fair, well run and well represented government in history.
Lol, Germany was bought and paid for decades ago and the party with the most political power is the Hells Angels. They even got their rivals federally banned, even though they are not!
This comment reads like LLM-generated text, but like... a pretty old version where it's basically MCMC text generation.
You read like a HAMC damage control bot. I am sick of being lorded over by criminals hiding in plain sight, it is why the economy sucks. They are sucking on it like leeches.
The simple fact that you can spend $1 in Meta ads to raise $1.02 in political contributions, at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, is fueling political campaigns.
Maybe 10 years ago there was a contentious Senate race here in my state. They spent tons of money courting voters, with ads in all kinds of media and a non-stop brigade of earnest young people (volunteers? paid?) going door to door and harassing people who hadn't voted early.
This year is somewhat similar, except the local media market is dead and a lions share of the money is going to 2 tech companies. I read they took 78% in the 2020 election cycle. You can guess which 2 companies those are.
Anyone else noticed the election has trashed your ad budgets? Doing CPC and CPM when suddenly hundreds of millions are being dumped across the board kinda sucks.
Yeah really hurt branding/prospecting - haven’t seen the impact for retargeting yet since I run super high bids there but surely will be affected soon.
Wish my employer took on political clients - such easy free money.
Nobody cares about courting voters.
The least competitive races in America are in Los Angeles and New York. They’re not advertising presidential candidates there to court voters. The votes don’t matter. They want a $25 donation, that they’ll plow $20 of back into more ads, and pocket $5 on overhead.
The state of affairs surrounding this practice as well as the amount of money used up in the election system generally is absolutely ridiculous.
Question for historians... Was there a time in the US that preying upon the elderly for political campaign funding like this would've been met with universal (both sides of the aisle) outrage, and probably cost the parties doing it many elections?
One of those crap jobs I had when I was young was a temp worker in a lock box that processed political contributions (early 90's). There would be trays of mail coming in from various campaigns, for various orgs (3 or 4, both Democratic and Repubican). Surveys were big -- and people would write all over them. But the first thing that happened was the money was pulled out and deposited. The bundles of surveys might have been looked at.
It was depressing as hell. You could tell people were looking for someone to listen. And as far as I know, they only reached someone doing a buck over minimum wage, who had to process x hundred envelopes per hour.
Now, of course, it's been streamlined -- there aren't checks anymore so it's all that much faster for the more efficient clearing of the marks money.
This reminds me of how absentee voting works.
For example, in 2020 New York state threw 3.62% of absentee ballots in the trash.
https://elections-blog.mit.edu/articles/deep-dive-absentee-b...
Some legitimately discarded I'm sure, but some were thrown out because a human thought the signature was off. And who knows if they got it right:
strictly scrutinized the ballots that were returned, and often did not even notify absentee voters that their ballot was rejected because of an administrative deficiency
Plus this type of thing happens all the time (happened to me this year in a different state):
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
The secret band of robbers and murderers robbing someone?! No way!
Endless political spam texts are infuriating enough even for the mentally fit. I actively advise people against making political donations now unless they're extremely careful about it, because they will be hounded by political groups for literally the rest of their lives (literally literally, not figuratively literally) if they ever share any kind of contact information.
This year when I checked my voter registration I noticed that the “phone number” field in my profile was not marked as required, and there was a little info icon that said “this is public information” when I clicked on it.
I removed my phone number and the number of text messages diminished (not all the way, but noticeably better). Not a magic bullet, but worth checking.
What's the difference between a scam text posing as a political fundraising text and a political fundraising text in appearance?
How do you know any of the political fundraising texts with weird links are legitimate?
That's the neat part: you don't.
STOP seems to work.
I believe it's legally required to?
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies only to "commercial" messages. Political ads are technically exempt, as a free speech issue. But because political ads go out via the usual SMS spam services, STOP usually works anyway. The services don't want their outgoing lines blocked.
I interact with wealthy retired elderly people every day. Yes, they are the #1 prey in our society. They are so harassed. Like wildebeests getting nibbled on by a pack of jackals.
Nibbled for their money, time, vote.
they don't even need to be wealth just lonely. My father in law lives on the other side of the country far away from any family. He has been giving every spare dollar to a con artist that has got him convinced they are going to get millions of dollars from the government but inevitably something gets in the way and the con artist need a little more money for them to finally get it... He has bounced between menial jobs as long as i and my wife have been together, before we had kid we tried to get him to come live here but he refused because he was so convinced he was going to soon be a millionaire. he is otherwise able to take care of himself is emotionally/mentally stable but wont listen to any one that says he is being scammed because the only person that is near him who talks to him is the one conning him.
Governments seem very focused on protecting people from easy-to-address, low-harm activities like website tracking and spam, but wholly unconcerned with scams and theft (which I consider much more harmful).
There used to be a time when retired US politicians with decades of service were still respected in retirement. Granted, this was before Gingrich's hyperpoliticizing of every bit of minutiae in America.
Then Fred Thompson, not satisfied with his $250K an hour lobbying gig or his acting career, decided he also needed to start hawking reverse mortgages to the elderly, and that was a wrap. Before people were willing to look past the lobbying... stopped being a thing after ole Fred was caught on TV and radio right next to the gold bouillon sellers.
The Clarence Thomas nomination hearings are I think a better marker for the beginning of our modern era of "hyperpoliticization" of everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas_Supreme_Court_...
I would opine it was Robert Bork a few years earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork_Supreme_Court_nomi...
One of the pieces of history I didn’t appreciate at the time, because I was just a kid: Bork was Solicitor General in the Nixon administration. When Nixon ordered that his AG fire the Special Prosecutor investigating Watergate, Nixon’s appointed AG and deputy (very ethically) resigned instead. This left Bork as acting AG, and unlike his superiors, Bork was very happy to fire the Special Prosecutor at his boss’s request. In other words, almost everyone in the Nixon administration had more ethics than Bork.
What was so disgusting and surprising about the Bork nomination is that it was clearly a reward for that behavior, one that persisted across multiple presidential terms. It sent a message that “no matter how damaging your lack of ethics might seem in the short term, there is a reward for loyalty and willingness to short-circuit the criminal process” that would have felt at home in an organized crime family. The stuff we see today is just a further development of the metastasizing cancer that began right there.
>...there is a reward for loyalty and willingness to short-circuit the criminal process” that would have felt at home in an organized crime family.
"Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed!"
I disagree. For one, Bork had already been refused a seat on the Supreme Court. Secondly, it's the first time that a mainstream political party ever succeeded in "othering" another group of straight white capitalists purely with propaganda.
Everyone forgets that the DNC forced out FDR's two-time VP for being too buddy-buddy with socialism, giving us Truman and a half century of the ultimate in hyperpartisanship (the kind with Nukes of Damocles hanging over everyone's heads).
One of my good friends is, in his words, older than oxygen. He lives across the street in a senior’s home and I always saw him out for walks.
I have a rule - when I see someone enough for them to become a familiar, I introduce myself. So I introduced myself to him and now he sends me a text message a few times a month for a coffee.
He was getting close to getting reined in by a scam. It was a Canadian party pulling the same shit as MAGA.
He said something really interesting.
You’re young and nobody listens to you. You just get dragged around, told where to go and what to say. Then, you hit around 40 and suddenly everyone listens to you. They will stop what they’re doing to cater to you. But then you turn really old, your wife dies and all of a sudden, you have nobody to even drag you around. You’re totally by yourself and day to day, it doesn’t matter if you live or die.
He knew it was a scam and knew when it got too expensive so decided to walk. But it was human contact. And as he says, loneliness is worse than being broke.
The best part of being friends with him is how the staff treats me at our spot. It’s a pub he used to go to with his wife when she was alive and the entire staff knows him very well.
Whenever we have coffee, one of the servers inevitably looks at him, points at me and says “Ray, I see you’re doing your good deed for the day.”
Without fail, his eyes twinkle and he replies, “If I don’t teach this young peckerhead a thing or two, we’re all doomed.”
I’m not sure there is a moral, but if you happen to see an older adult regularly, stop and talk. You may protect them from scams. You may end up with a close friend. If you’re really lucky, you may even get called “peckerhead.”
Edit - Me spell not good.
He implies he got involved with this Canadian MAGA type party because no one listens to him. How does that make you, someone who sits down with him regularly and listens, feel?
I bring this up because in my experience, people are rarely honest about why they support such politics/politicians.
> [...] now he sends me a text message a few times a month for a coffee
Maybe he's bored all the rest of the time in the month when they're not having coffee together (the other 95%+ of the month)
Good on you for being a nice human, peckerhead.
[flagged]
What were these damnable canadian MAGAers pulling exactly? Were they promising to enforce immigration laws? Lower taxes? Economic protectionism?
More like demagoguery: emotionally fueled fear-mongering.
THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING. YOUR GOP INNER CIRCLE LEADER MEMBERSHIP IS ABOUT TO BE DEACTIVATED.
You have to wonder how much of the economy similarly relies on uncanceled opt-out services that this demographics never knew it subscribed to.
Not just that demographic, every demographic. There was a Planet Money podcast episode just the other day called The Subscription Trap. The podcast host and the founders of this tool, all seemingly young, tech enabled people all had hundreds (if not thousands) in unknown subscriptions. It's a problem top to bottom.
> tech enabled people all had hundreds (if not thousands) in unknown subscriptions
I don't really understand how people can't easily see this on their CC bill(s). You don't even need to check monthly, just every so often and make sure you recognize all the charges.
They don't (have to) care. At least in America, the vast majority of people have never felt the pinch of being "broke"-broke. When you have money coming in, you have enough to waste on dumb stuff. Going off my own list: $100/m phone bills when $15/m ones are available (even less, because employee discount!)? Well, it's more convenient (it wasn't, it was just money getting shoveled into the trash). Eating out at lunch? Making food is a chore (actually, stew pots are your friend, Panda Express is not). $200/m for a storage unit isn't reasonable. Neither is a new car note. Overspending on insurance. Monthly media subscriptions. On and on. You don't realize it until the money simply isn't there anymore, and you're forced to make cuts. And it's at that point that you realize, "Dang, I could have had a lot less stress now if I'd been more vigilant about spending money I didn't need to - if I'd just known better - then." But the entire economy essentially encourages and then preys on your apathy and lack of knowledge.^1
By the time you see what's going on, it's too late. You're a bum and no one cares about what you have to say.
1: Actually, this is not in and of itself a bad thing. "Stupid" purchasing decisions keeps artists and artisans in food and home, is the "slack" that keeps labor inefficient enough to be tolerable. The problem is twofold: 1) that corporations systematically prey on this tendency, and 2) its distribution as an ability is lopsided: most people can be extremely frivolous with money, and some can't be frivolous at all, and there's very little middle ground.
Everything you said is 'known' though. The quote I referenced said 'unknown'. I know I overpay for cell service because it works for me and I don't want to risk is not working where I need it to work. That's different than if I had a second cell plan that I didn't even know about and was still paying for.
I am always shocked at the number of people who don't balance and reconcile their accounts each month. I go through each of our accounts at least monthly and compare each financial org's ideas of our transactions with our own record. I cannot fathom not doing this. And yet, people look at my like I'm nuts when the subject comes up.
Sometimes they err in our favor and I still try to have it fixed, expecting that eventually they'll figure it out and try to claw the money back. Goldman Sachs gave us about $200 earlier this year. It went something like this:
- Starting balance: $1000
- We paid: $700
- New charges: $300
- End balance: $400
I spent a couple hours on the phone trying to get them to realize their arithmetic was wrong. I finally insisted that guy I was talking to pull up a calculator, punch in the numbers, and see for himself. "Let's see, $1000 minus $700 is $300, plus $300 is $600, so... wait, why did we tell you $400?" "I don't know!" I even escalated to their audit department who said their math all checks out that I only owed them $400 instead of $600. I am certain to my core that someday they're going to ask for that $200 plus interest.
One possible idea is to simply publicly fund the political parties and do away with political donations entirely.
They're an essential part of your democratic system of government and could therefore be considered an essential service, so they would be funded in the same way as any other essential service.
That would not only solve this problem but also prevent the corporate lobbyists from having too much influence and corrupting the system.
Hopefully it'll be capped and that will mean less ads everywhere.
In the US, with the first amendment, it's hard to ban private spending.
Only since the current SC redefined money as speech, wasn't a problem for the first couple of hundred of years when saner justices prevailed.
Well, I did say spending and not campaign contributions.
How do you ban a candidate from paying for air time like Ross Perot did?
> One possible idea is to simply publicly fund the political parties and do away with political donations entirely.
No, political parties should be abolished. People can get together, call themselves whatever they want, and recommend people as candidates for office, but these private organizations should not be institutionalized in law or supported in any way. We shouldn't even be helping with their primaries.
Law shouldn't recognize anything called a "political party" or have any rules governing them. They are not essential, they are corrupting.
Most laws regulating political parties came about to enforce civil rights. The political parties when left to their own devices engaged in discriminatory practices, which effectively excluded large swathes of people from core parts of the democratic process.
That would be even better. I would go a step further and have local citizens assemblies manage as much as possible (direct democracy).
But with the current system, public funding is probably a better idea than private funding.
Terrible, self-indulgent page design. That aside, my parents are around 80 and while neither is showing signs of dementia, dad readily admits he's not as sharp as he used to be. Mom is in denial. For their ages, they're doing pretty well. As far as I know, neither has been victims of scams but it troubles me when I'm at their house and see things like "Congratulations! You just won $10,000" banner ads blinking on their monitors and tablets. Maybe I should set up some kind of network wide ad blocking for them but in general I try not to be intrusive on how they run their lives. I know the day will come when they're not able to and it worries me that my siblings and I might not see it before it's too late. Medical science has done many wonderful things for helping people live longer but it seems more common for our physical bodies to outlive our minds. In that period, there's lots of room for exploitation.
I don't want this come across the wrong way, but have you tried talking to them about scams, or what they see in the banner ads? It might give you an idea of how credulous they are. My parents are in a similar age group, and I frequently share information about scams with them. I don't expect all the information to stick, but it just keeps re-enforcing the ideas of 'no free lunches', 'too good to be true', 'pressured to act quickly' etc.
If they aren't already using a password manager with an emergency access feature, get them set up with one. As an example, if you use Bitwarden then get a family plan and add them to it - that allows setting an emergency contact who can access or take over the account if needed. 1Password and other competitors should all also have this.
The other thing you might do is have their banking and credit card accounts set up to email you transaction notifications - that's obviously more intrusive, but it should let you catch repeating suspicious transactions.
Having seen both of my parents develop dementia at different rates, I'll say that yes it does sneak up. There wasn't a clear day where yesterday they were self-sufficient and now they are not.
It is natural for the sufferer to develop coping mechanisms hide problems from themselves and others. The problems have to grow until the coping mechanisms start to collapse, and then suddenly they are much more evident. Another aspect is the child's denial. It is a significant shift in your worldview to see a parent go from being self-sufficient to dependent. To recognize the myriad day to day functions you took for granted that now require a caregiver's involvement.
Also, the cognitive problems do not develop as a slow and continuous trend. There are different cycles overlaid with seasons, illnesses, and even time of day. So you see fluctuations in their capacity and returning moments of lucidity and function help sustain denial.
I've heard it said, and I agree, the process of caring for someone with dementia includes a grieving process with all the complexities that ever has. You are watching many layers of the person die, sometimes over and over. At times you are faced with the living husk of the person you remember. Or worse, a strange subset of their prior personality traits and memories.
It can take a crisis to force the issue, if families get stuck in denial. Sadly, this also makes later caregiver arrangements more difficult. As far as I can tell, the happiest dementia sufferers seem to be ones who were able to transition into a supportive care environment before they progressed too far, so they had the capacity to adapt and familiarize themselves to new routines. Those routines help them cope in later phases. Those who go down kicking and screaming may be stuck with a care environment that seems (to them) threatening and disorienting.
Everyone really needs to have an up-to-date Power Of Attorney Directive and a trusted agent who can act on their behalf once they lose their cognitive ability and financial judgment.
Yes, and also a medical advance directive in most jurisdictions where that is separate from a legal/financial POA.
This is from experience. You should take control of their banking accounts and home ownership now not later. Go to the bank with your parents and tell the bank you need to be added to their account. Talk with a lawyer or nonprofit and figure out how to add your name so your parents cannot literally sign their house away to a con artist.
The top text says Republican and Democratic campaigns but later on it admits
> most often to Republican candidates
and that for Democrats it was mostly left leaning pacs instead of democratic candidates.
And to what extent does the head swindler in chief contribute to this attitude?
> The biggest beneficiary of the small-dollar donations from unwitting donors identified by CNN was Donald Trump
[flagged]
[flagged]
Where’s the joke?
[flagged]
You have no idea what dementia is.
You must realize that dementia patients aren't blank canvases and their delusions are based on the people they were before the disease struck. If you don't work on yourself before its too late, then you will be exposed by the disease. It's not difficult to understand.
I am very sympathetic to this. However, much of that hate is born of fear. When some sociopath deliberately and systematically tells old people that various "they" are coming for them, can we really blame the ones that react in terror with the hope that someone will protect them?
Dementia is an excuse. It may be the only excuse. If someone isn't thinking clearly, we can't get mad at them for not thinking clearly.
Fear is not an excuse and I’m not mad at them. Actions have consequences and ignorance is no excuse for people causing harm. They no longer should be allowed to exert influence if they don’t have agency. They must be handled in a way that is beneficial to society overall, and one way is to stop making excuses for them and act to remove their destructive capabilities.