That’s because new challengers find it even more difficult to raise funds when funds are capped to favor small donors.

Scalia recognized that these laws seem to have the side-effect of more and more incumbents running unopposed.. as one reporter put it:

“Justice Scalia particularly said that Congress, when it passed this campaign finance reform law, wasn’t really trying to protect the process. They were trying to protect themselves and that the law would enable incumbents to remain in office and stifle speech.”

Now we can pretend that the law can trump reality and everyone will obey it.

Or we can concede that if anyone is going to be bought then its’ best to know about it as opposed to have it happen in secret.

That’s why I advocate rapid disclosure and easy to find reports on who “owns” who.

Then on election day someone can judge “Do I want to vote for Candiate X knowing that MerchantManA is his sugar daddy”

I think that is the best system

I assume we all know about this stuff. It’s probably no odder than the Reagans consulting with astrologers before making policy decisions…

What business is it of the governments how much money one person wants to give to another?

Without any restrictions on political funding, wealthy special interests simply buy the government. Money buys power; having increased power, it buys control of even more money. It’s a vicious cycle, that invariably leads to extreme class divisions and plutarchy.

We’re getting there quickly. Matter of fact, we may already have arrived. People probably think I’m a commie or something because I keep harping on some simple statistics–but the statistics are important: The bottom 40% of the US population now own only 0.2% of the nation’s total wealth; the top 5% of the population now own 58.9%; and the “middle class”–that is, the middle 20% American society–now own only 3.8% of the total wealth of the nation.

Should political power–the degree of control people have over the destiny of the nation–correspond directly to those same numbers?

I heard that the drinking age used to be 18. And the voting age was higher (or varied by state?)

Because of Vietnam the voting age was recklessly lowered to 18.

Then in the late 70s and finishing in the early 80s.. drunk driving caused a public hysteria, so in the reaction to that, the drinking ages state-by-state were raised to 21 or else the state would have its fed funds cut off

It’s simply a fact of human nature that if a person wants to participate in the political process by advocating for a politician that spending money is the fundamental way that this is achieved.

What business is it of the governments how much money one person wants to give to another? If the payer is willing to give big bucks to the receiver than the payer is going to find a way to get it in the right hands.. laws or no laws.

By putting up such a giant, ugly maze of laws , I feel Congress has created an environment which gives every incentive for actors to act corruptly.

What should be done is get rid of all the finance rules. Make some new basic simple ones

1 - Only American citizens can donate
2 - There is no limit on the funds an American can give to any number of politicians.
3 - All contributions must be publication declared and accessible on Internet within days
4 - Define some formulas so that the public can easily see which individuals are a candidate’s “smoke-filled room puppet master”.. etc..
5 - No taxpayer via Govt / Public - Financing of campaigns. The govt should stay out of campaigning and stop figuring out how to “help”. A person running for office should have to engage the public closest and nearest to him to build up a base and get money that way.
6 - No TV Ad restrictions though full disclosure who made the ad.

I don’t have an opinion on corporate/labor/NGO/etc. contributions to politicians.

Ten days after larouchepac.com stunned Washington, D.C. with the article “Is the Democratic Party Accepting Gold Fillings?” about the funder of the 527 movement, billionaire George Soros’s working for the Nazi killing machines that slaughtered 500,000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, MoveOn.org, the biggest of species that Soros created in 2004, announced that it is closing down its 527 forever, and is “moving on” to other loopholes, renouncing “big money.”

It’s a hoax.

LPAC drew blood from the Soros crowd when it reported, in Soros’s own words, his past working for the regime of SS Lt Gen. Kurt Becher, head of the Nazi Waffen-SS section known euphemistically as The Economic Department of the SS Command, where young Soros was given a job looting the properties of Jews in Hungary.

Filling out the picture, LPAC released a full-length pamphlet last week called, “Your Enemy, George Soros,” [PDF dossier, above] on Soros’s hostile takeover of the Democratic Party through MoveOn and other front groups.

MoveOn’s chief Eli Pariser announced to supporters that “it’s time to close the 527 forever–and to challenge organizations on the right to do the same thing. That means we won’t raise money for our election work from foundations, unions, or even individuals who want to give more than $5,000.” Pariser claims this “not relying on big donors” revolution is all due to Barack Obama, who believes in the “Little Donor.”

What’s really going on? This announcement won’t actually change MoveOn one bit, because they have not taken any “big money” through the 527 since 2005, according to Federal Election Commission Reports. Instead, they’ve taken plenty of big money through a plethora of other entities, a Political Action Commmittee (PAC), a voter fund, moveonliberals.org, and MoveOn individual candidates and Congressional district funds. None of these are 527s.

You see, the FEC slammed the 527s for what they did in the 2004 election cycle, when Soros put in between $30 and $40 million to the groups. MoveOn’s 527 paid a fine of $150,000 for violations of Federal election rules. Soros-funded America Coming Together (ACT) was fined $775,000, and the Media Fund was fined $580,000, for illegal activities. On the right, the group Swift Boat Vets, that received $4.4 million from a single GOP donor, Bob Perry, was fined $299,500 for attacking John Kerry.

So, it’s no wonder that both Barack Obama and John McCain are “against” the 527s.

Soros is not out of the soft money game that he created. There are lots of loopholes, one of which is the PAC’s “independent expenditures.” Moveon.org PAC, in the period of February 2008, reported nearly $214,000 in independent expenditures (FEC report line 24); these were to “support or oppose” Obama ($61,739.16) and Maryland Congressional candidate Donna Fern Edwards ($152,120.00). Of the funds spent for Obama the largest were to Campus Media Group (Bloomington, Minn.) ($36,429.59), Google ($15,000) for advertising, and $3,750 to the Texas Democratic Party for a list purchase.

The George Soros Dossier is now available in PDF.

Obama has taken $405,747 from the Pharmaceutical industry. [opensecrets.org]

Obama has received $1,185,937 from the Commercial Banking industry. [opensecrets.org]

Obama has received over six million dollars from the Securities & Investment industry. [opensecrets.org]

Obama has taken $608,822 from the Insurance industry. [opensecrets.org]

Obama has taken $168,584 from the Mortgage Banking industry. [opensecrets.org]

Prior to His Presidential Campaign, Sen. Obama took Money from Lobbyists and PACs:

1996-2004: $296,000 of the $461,000 Sen. Obama raised as a state senator came from PACs, corporate contributions or unions.

“But behind Obama’s campaign rhetoric about taking on special interests lies a more complicated truth. A Globe review of Obama’s campaign finance records shows that he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and PACs as a state legislator in Illinois, a US senator, and a presidential aspirant.

In Obama’s eight years in the Illinois Senate, from 1996 to 2004, almost two-thirds of the money he raised for his campaigns — $296,000 of $461,000 — came from PACs, corporate contributions, or unions, according to Illinois Board of Elections records. He tapped financial services firms, real estate developers, healthcare providers, oil companies, and many other corporate interests, the records show.” [Boston Globe, 8/9/07]

Actually, you can have those too if you decide to apply yourself in that direction.

Can you say disingenuous? LOL