So far we’ve had Civil Service reform (weakening) in Amendment S, and Marijuana Legalization in Amendment 64. Tonight, the last statewide initiative on the ballot: Amendment 65, the (kinda-sorta) Campaign Finance Reform initiative.
So here’s the problem:
- A lot of people agree that excess money from individuals and organizations distorts the political process, giving undue influence on the electorate, and undue influence on beholden office-seekers. Even where corruption doesn’t actually occur, the very appearance of corruption is corrosive to the process.
- The Supreme Court says that money = speech, and that corporations = people, so any sort of limits on campaign financing in statutory law are limited and (if challenged) dubious at best.
Amendment 65 tackles this problem. Sort of. It doesn’t actually do anything, but it’s meant to send a “message”:
- It instructs the Colorado congressional delegation to propose and support a US constitutional amendment that would allow the feds and states to limit campaign contributions and spending.
- It instructs the state legislature to pass any US constitutional amendment that gets proposed to that end.
Which is all very nice, but even a state constitutional amendment cannot actually compel an elected representative (federal or state) to vote a certain way. So this Amendment is largely a feel-good “sense of the people” kind of thing — a political statement by the populace to future state and federal representatives.
On the one hand, that seems fairly useless (the arguments against suggest that the effort would be better placed electing congressional representatives that support this proposal). On the other hand, it is a statement of the will of the people, to be flouted (should the opportunity arise) at some peril. On the gripping hand, yes, is this really something we need to be embedding in the state constitution — a non-binding “will of the people” of those who went to the polls in 2012?
(I’m not going to argue the merits of campaign finance and spending reform. I tend to believe in its need and disbelieve that any sort of system will ever be effective in restricting it save for a completely publicly funded campaign setup, which will introduce its own distortions and challenges.)
My net-net recommendation is in support of Amendment 65, to vote “Yes” on it. I’m not altogether happy with either what it will actually do, nor with cluttering up the state constitution with such things (really, if there’s a candidate for a legislative proposition, rather than constitutional one, this is it).
But I think the basic principle of trying to stem the tide of millionaires, billionaires, and shadowy consortia thereof flooding the airwaves and mailboxes with whatever lying crap they want to (on any particular side of any particular race) and having that be the most prominent emblem of “free speech” in our land seems a worthy philosophical effort. I will vote “Yes” on Amendment 65.
I totally agree with you. The only speech most of us have to talk back to cold hard cash with is to vote in a way that shows all the money in the world won’t buy an election. The other thing we can do is stop watching network TV stations during election seaasons. If we can drive the cost of advertising to astromonical levels maybe the corptocracy will stop spending so much money on them.