The Campaign Lottery

This past week, the right leaning Supreme court essentially threw out most restraints on campaign contributions by individuals, corporations, and Unions. This will lead to outright bribery and extortion of our nation's politicians. The corporate ability to influence individual politicians is particularly troubling. The banking, insurance, and other corporate lobbies will be able to threaten and coerce individual politicians into voting against the public good. If you God fearing, gun toting, queer hating republicans are wondering why I'm not happy that the unions have the same ability; I'll tell you. it's simply because the unions do not have enough cash to directly influence very many local elections, especially in states where union representation is low. As Jon Stewart said on the Daily Show the other night: "My banker, Morgan Stanley, and my Barber, Stanley Morgan, are now equally allowed to contribute millions of dollars to the candidate of their choice."

Here's a related personal story. I was at a party last week, where I got into a discussion with a member of Larry Kissells' staff about Kissells' vote on health care. I believe that he made a huge mistake in voting against the house version of the bill under the guise of protecting medicare, and I think that he might lose the next election partially because of his vote. Anyway, I'm having this friendly, but some what loud give and take with Kissells' staff member, when someone else joins the discussion and immediately raises my hackles by saying that federally mandated health care is not mentioned in the Constitution, and therefore, like social security, and medicare should not be the law of the land.

Now, here's my take on this. This view of our founding father's intent is analogous to the Bible thumpers view that the Bible is the absolute word of God, and that the Earth was created in a week and is 6000 years old, and fossil remains of sea creatures were created and placed on mountain tops by God to confuse us. Our founding fathers lived in a time when, as Stephen Ambrose said about Thomas Jefferson, it was possible for an educated man to know everything. But, it was not possible that the framers of the constitution could anticipate the trajectory and every vector of modern society. While the basic framework of the constitution should remain intact, it is the responsibility of modern lawmakers, and the courts to determine the best course of action to insure that the goals stated in the Preamble to the United States Constitution are met. I don't think that our founding fathers would have approved of interpretations of the law which stack the deck against the majority of the citizens of the country.

Let me come up for air, take a deep breath, and get back to were the title of this blog leads. Had the Supreme court not struck down most campaign finance law, here is my idea of how to finance federal election campaigns. There is a widely ignored section at the end of your Federal tax return where you can contribute two bucks toward Presidential election campaigns. Why not change this number to twenty dollars, with half the money going to the financing of campaigns, and the other half going to a national lottery pool which would be allocated to the States by population, and meted out as prizes in million dollar increments. With nearly eighty million tax returns filed annually (I looked it up), and the vast majority of those returns calling for a refund, there is potential for 1.6 billion dollars in donations, with eight hundred million each going to campaign financing and lottery winning. This works out to an average of sixteen, one million dollar prizes for each state. Compared to Power Ball or Lotto, I think that's a pretty good return on your gambling dollar.