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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fred Gohlke who wrote (10895)	2/6/2006 5:05:07 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541504

I found the article somewhat interesting. It bring some personal experience with the problem in to the issue. As for his specific recommendations. In Washington, any number of conflicts of interest must be untangled. To begin to do this, former members of Congress should be prohibited from visiting the floor of the House, the prohibition on lobbying by former members and their staffs should be extended from one year to four and all gifts and travel for members and their employees should be banned. I'm not sure that prohibiting former members of Congress from visiting the floor of the House would really have any effect. As for extending the prohibition on lobbying by former members and their staffs I might consider supporting it, but I also think that it only nibbles around the edge of the problem. I think while the government doles out so much money and so many special favors, while at the same time taxing and controlling things to a great extent there will be many powerful people, companies, or organizations with a very strong incentive to try an manipulate the government, either in self defense or to achieve some political aim, or to get money or other benefits from the government. You can try to add more and more rules to make things less corrupt buy as long as the incentive is there people will be likely to find some way around these rules, or some way to get away with violating them. I think we have to find some way to reduce the incentive. If politicians are "for sale", most reform efforts focus on the supply. They try to make it harder for politicians to be for sale. Well I think we need to reduce demand if we are going to have a less corrupt system. Congress would be well-served by scrapping its ethics committees and replacing them with an independent ethics commission made up of former judges, former members of Congress and other eminent citizens. That would be at least worth considering. It's time to explore ways to lower the barriers of entry for challengers Maybe. That's rather general. He does get specific when he says "through, for instance, free television airtime for all candidates." But I think that idea is a can of worms, and he doesn't give any other specific ideas about how to lower the barriers. And to create more competitive congressional districts, we need to follow the leads of states such as Arizona and Iowa and put the responsibility of drawing district boundaries in the hands of nonpartisan boards. I could probably support that. Tim