Friday, July 11, 2008

Sensible Amendments?

I was just reading the post about a potential privacy amendment here, particularly the comment from "ArthurKC," where suggests that there should be an amendment to the US constitution that reads:

no person who serves in an office of public trust or authority it the United States, or in any individual State, shall recieve any monetary donations, or any other gifts from any source whatsoever, except wherein the public official must conduct a campaign for election to office

in cases where a candidate for office collects donations for a campaign, no person shall donate money or any other gift unless the person donating money is legally entitled to vote in the election in question

In no case may a political candidate recieve gifts or donations from any entity except bonified citizens of The United States who are able to vote


I think that's a good start to getting the money out of politics, but it has a few loopholes which the programmer in me wants to try to fix. The most glaring of these is that it still allows for the equivalent of 527 organizations. Here's my take to try to fix that:

No person who serves in an office of public trust or authority it the United States, or in any individual State, shall recieve any monetary donations, or any other gifts from any source whatsoever, except wherein the public official must conduct a campaign for election to office.

No person shall expend tangible resources with the intent of influencing the outcome of an election unless that person is legally entitled to vote in the election in question.

No entity shall expend tangible resources greater than those received from persons eligible to vote in a particular election with the intent of influencing the outcome of that election.

In no case may a political candidate or organization recieve gifts or donations from any entity except citizens of The United States who are entitled to vote.


There's also an interesting article on Things That Are Not In the U.S. Constitution. Some of those are definitely interesting food for thought.

Personally, I think that the proposed Privacy and Campaign Finance amendments might not be entirely bad ideas. They, and the impact they might have, are certainly interesting to think about.

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