As I was writing this, the House actually passed a war powers resolution. This is from NBC News:
The House offered a rare rebuke to President Donald Trump on Wednesday, passing a Democratic-led measure to end his war with Iran over objections from Republican leadership.
It was one of two Democratic-led measures opposed by the White House that advanced in the GOP-led House. Lawmakers also passed a motion that would unlock a vote on sending aid to Ukraine.
The Iran war powers resolution, offered by Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, had been heading for a vote before the House left for its Memorial Day recess May 21. But it was abruptly pulled from the floor when it appeared too many Republicans were absent to defeat it.
On Wednesday, it passed 215-208, with four Republicans joining all Democrats in voting yes: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Warren Davidson of Ohio.
The resolution directs Trump to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities with Iran, unless Congress votes to declare war or authorizes using military force against it. It would not force him to end the conflict, however; it is a symbolic expression of disapproval of the war with Iran.
I don’t understand why this would be only symbolic if Congress has the power to declare war and Trump does not. But that takes us into my next topic —
Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times is one of the best political commenters anywhere. His current column is America Broke Something When It Gave Trump a Second Chance. It’s worth reading, and not just because of what it says about Trump
Much of the disruption and destruction of the past year and change is downstream of the revolutionary orientation of Roberts, Vought and the other alumni of Project 2025 who have taken up places in and around the Trump administration. To observe the aggrandizement of power in the executive, the decimation of the federal bureaucracy, the destruction of much of the nation’s medical, scientific and public health infrastructure and the broad attack on racial and gender equality is to see the many faces of a furious effort to restructure the existing nation to match the one envisioned by these far-right ideologues.
If this is all true, and it is, then any plausible response to Project 2025 must include a larger vision for the future of the American Republic. A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not for restoration of what was.
But can the current Democratic Party do that? Can they move beyond proposals for better supporting child care and breaking up utility monopolies?
As it happens, several Democratic groups are drafting the equivalent of a Project 2029. And so far, unfortunately, it is not the reconstruction agenda the country needs. It is, instead, just another Democratic Party policy document: a grab bag of ideas stitched together with the usual slogans and gestures toward economic populism.
This reminds me of one of my biggest complaints about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump — there was no vision. She went on and on about how qualified she was. To do what? She said she would “fight for us.” To do what? If you went to her website she did indeed have lots of proposals, most of which would have improved existing programs. If there was anything genuinely innovative or groundbreaking I’m not remembering it. Trump, on the other hand, made lots of grandiose promises he didn’t keep. Notice who won.
This is not to say voters are all idiots, necessarily. Hillary Clinton promised a well-managed status quo, and Trump promised change. People were in the mood for change. But Trump didn’t know how to deliver on what he promised. He had establishment people around him, keeping him in check, and he wasn’t able to do anything too stupid and screw up Obama’s economy (for which Trump took credit). And if it weren’t for Covid, voters might not have noticed how incompetent Trump truly was. Too bad they forgot.
Too much of the Dem establishment has spent entire long careers trying to not stick out too much and becoming a target of the Right. Now we need them to stand and be bold and directly address all the weaknesses in the system that Trump exploited. As Jamelle Bouie wrote,
But none of this reflects or represents a far-reaching or comprehensive idea of what the nation might be. There is no coherent worldview at work, nor does there seem to be any inkling or awareness of the obstacles — structural, political and institutional — that will confront, and likely stymie, all but the most threadbare and ineffectual Democratic agendas for governing.
What difference will specific policy items make if there are profound obstacles to simply governing at all? A Project 2029 that has nothing to say about either the Senate filibuster, or an ideologically captured Supreme Court, or extreme partisan gerrymandering — among other concerns — is not a Project 2029 worth the time or effort.
There’s an Axios article from a few weeks ago that describes a “civil war” within the Democratic party:
Moderate Democrats are worried that progressive candidates, especially those with baggage, will hurt their chances of flipping key Senate seats if nominated.
Progressives argue that party leaders are relying on an outdated, cookie-cutter formula to determine who is “electable.”
It may vary from one state to another, but I do side with the progressives. Promising the voters a well-managed status quo hasn’t worked that well for some time, frankly. Somehow the “moderate” Dems don’t notice.
So what’s to be in the Dems’ Project 2029? Congress taking back its power might be item one
Here's one stupid, corny, idea about messaging. Republicans can only win by getting people to hate Democrats, so they need to make people hateful. Therefore, any message promoting love, society, community, should be front and center right now, while people brainstorm what good policy positions reflect the demands coming from the better vibes out there.
Project 2029 needs to include (in my (very) humble opinion) universal health care coverage, yes, even for "aliens." But I don't want to push for that right now… I want to push "stronger together," I want to push, "Republicans let people die during Covid. Who does that?" I want to push what it means to lose health insurance, even though you're "playing by the rules."
Over at Digby's one of the bloggers calls this "showing the brownie, not the recipe," except, I'm trying to hit more "think of the joy of a cooking class, and all the lovely foods you get to taste!" If you do that right, universal health care falls into our lap, I think.
I mean, I guess that's a question-begging statement, "obviously, since it didn't fall into our lap, it wasn't done right!" but, I hope you understand what I mean. When people see scared parents who can't take their kid to the ED, and have to wait for the clinic on Monday, and see it as a problem that's so easy to fix, FRANCE has fixed it, CANADA has fixed it, the UK has fixed it (in a really crappy way that's always breaking down, but, rightwingers, amirite?).
Make it obvious that it should be done, but not directly, because we may pivot to some other, better, policy, like, taking the nuclear codes out of Trump's hands, so he doesn't destroy this beautiful world that he can't understand.
One thing I'm sure of: if this is a "who can hate the other side more?" Republicans will win on experience, but if it's "who loves America more? Who loves her troops enough to KEEP THEM ON NORMAL DEPLOYMENTS, for example?" I think Democrats will not just win, but maybe enough to ensure a Senate trial, if impeachment happens.
Tick-tock. Time is running out on both Trump / MAGA and establishment Dems. In five years, many electeds are going to be gone, and a new generation will take the reins. The latter will be emboldened by the coming collapse of the Republican party and the monumental corruption, treason, and depravity revealed in its wake. You haven't heard anything yet. Once Trump is out of the picture, people will be free to talk.
They'll also be emboldened by the large problems facing the country, left festering for years, and new ones: massive layoffs due to AI. There will have to be some kind of massive support program – almost a minimum guaranteed income – to help those affected. Think Republicans will help anybody? They're on their way to becoming completely radioactive. And extinct.
And so I'm not so worried about a Project 2029. Of course we need one, but first job is to get our people in this November, then start the investigations to shine a light on the massive corruption, treason, and depravity. And then a Democratic president in 2028. There will be plenty of Project 2029 plans by then, because it will be the greatest opening Democrats will have had since the New Deal or LBJ's Great Society. I expect a full political realignment by 2028, similar to the Reagan Revolution of 1980.
I've spent time with James Talarico, and this is why he terrifies MAGA Republicans
There already are, but I'm talking about vision, not plans. Big picture stuff. What kind of country are we? How do we fix what is broken so another Trump can't break it again?
There will be plenty of plans, large and small, especially after the stress test Trump has put us through. I know what you mean, but I can't stress how big of a turning point we're coming into.
People are already talking about coming Constitutional Amendments, and restructuring the Supreme Court. Our side has never been lacking for vision, but only the incrementalists were able to get anything done, for yers. This is going to change.
"— not for restoration of what was."
The DNC is incapable of vision, so if anything is articulated, expect it from a candidate for POTUS. Newsome did a nice job of opposing Trump – that's woefully not enough. AOC has said, and I paraphrase that her ambitions are more sweeping than being the first woman president – she wants to change the system.
The whole DNC war against progressives stems from an assumption that Democrats must cater to the rich – the good rich, which is defined as fat cats who open their wallets for 'centrist' Democrats. The policy provision that 'good' rich people want is low taxes for them. And they're willing to reward candidates who sign on, before, during, and after their term of office. Reliable centrist Democrats will be rewaded is they protect their prime constituency. The centrist Democrat has his counterpart in the GOP, and they have the same mission. Together, they ALWAYS form a majority to prevent making the one percent cough up dough for programs that don't benefit the elite.
Here's the dynamic – when considering anything sweeping and potentially expensive, like health care for all, corporations and the ultra-rich are exempt from bearing the cost. The feasibility has to be examined so the middle class and homeless will pay, since they would be the prime beneficiaries.
I do not 'hate' the rich, but I identify with Sutton's Law. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied, "Because that's where the money is," Looking at the graph of US Census data, the top five percent has seen a real income growth three times larger than the middle quintile. I'm unashamed in my support of a redistribution of wealth – not of cash but of essential benefits that we CAN afford if we tax the rich.
The DNC keeps trying to have it both ways – we are for the downtrodden, but the DNC places a higher priority on protecting the wealth of the elite than the survival of the homeless. Or the life of the middle class who can't afford health care and in some cases will die fo the lack of it. Or child care, or education, all of which are prioritized by moderate Democrats after the wealth of the wealthy. The selection of candidates from the states to national office reflects this. I was around when the Democrats fell into civil war in Chicago over institutional racism and Vietnam. I anticipate we may, as a party, face that same kind of traumatic redefinition of values.
Yes, we have to restore the vision of Congress as defined by the framers. We don't need the fillibustter until a supermajority of gentlemen rule the Senate. For the next decade, I think there will always be a bipartisan minority willing to kill campaign finance reform. I think Democrats should embrace the idea of a healthy conservative par???????ty in Congress, but that the new party MUST respect democracy. The GOP wants to go back to the original version of voting, which excluded by race, gender, and income to r???????estr???????ict the voting franchise to white, male, landowners. We have to refor???????m the USSC by incr???????easing the size or legislative progress will be undone in shor???????t or???????der.
At the end of the Civil War, Lincoln was clear. There would be reconstruction of the South but there would not be slavery. We have to fix education and the medical system in the rural South and make sure they know how a better standard of living happened. It may take decades for changes to show up in elections, so we should begin ASAP. Charter schools should see the axe as soon as funding for a national educational system is in place. The public schools should be the best in the world. Militias and hate groups should be infiltrated, and if they are in violation of the law, broken up with leaders sent to jail. This is not 'weaponized' retibution – you are free to have and speak your opinions, but if/when you band together to deprive others of their rights and/or power, you have crossed a line. The good news is that the climate of open racism means we know who to watch.
You always, each day, have a plan, then things come up. Lately things just keep going up or breaking down. So, each day we get to buy what we need most and what we can still afford. Each day we try to fix what we can and go on with what seems to still be working. Then go to the next day with the adjusted plan.
As far as I know, that has always been the plan of the Dems. When republicans get control we have the same plan, just a bigger mess to work around and clean up if we can.
It seems to be the only working plan the country ever had. At least for the last century or so. So why all this ado about a grand plan? A grand plan like prohibition, now how did that work?
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Try not to miss the point by quite so much, okay? And read the Jamelle Bouie column. This isn't about plans. I repeat, THIS ISN'T ABOUT PLANS. Plans we got already.
I agree with Doug's idea that " …if anything [like Vision] is articulated, expect it from a candidate for POTUS", not some Blue Project 2029.
Firstly, IMO, Project 2025 was created by Heritage and the other Think Tanks which are the backbone (or spinal chord) of the GOP – and the Democratic Party has no institutional analogue to that infrastructure. I always saw Project 2025 as rather pitiful propaganda: an attempt to promote traditional GOP priorities by painting them Trump Gold. It wasn't aimed at undecided voters; it was aimed at MAGAts, and at Trump himself. Its secondary function was as a guide to Trad GOP politicians, helping them learn how to paint themselves Trump Gold to win over MAGAt voters.
The Democratic Party has no Donald Trump, no Outsider who has taken over the Party's base (Yay!). But hmmm; if the DNC hadn't managed to block Bernie Sanders in 2016, they may have eventually produced a similar document to try to regain control of "their" Party…
There are other structural reasons that the Democratic Party would have a hard time producing a "Project 2029". The most important of these is the fact that the Democratic Party is a coalition with no single core (at least since Big Labor died). Each piece of that coalition requires adherence to specific policies – often including policies which are distasteful to other members of the coalition.
LGBTQ advocates are the most obvious example of this; their *requirement* for cultural acceptance alienates both Hispanic Catholics and traditional Black Church Democrats. Black and Latino Democrats are both fighting for a larger piece of The Pie, which gets tougher as The Pie gets smaller. And the poorest (and richest!) parts of the Coalition all get pissed at Environmentalists when we say that we have to stop pretending that The Pie can keep getting bigger forever…
But there's nothing new about this aspect of the Democratic Party, and it has muddled through before. OTOH, in recent decades, the Democratic Party has become way too dependent on super-charismatic Presidential candidates (like Bill Clinton & Barack Obama).
…and we're back to Doug's observation that any Big New Ideas for uniting Democrats (and Independents???) will have to wait for the 2028 Presidential Primary.
But can the current Democratic Party do that? Can they move beyond proposals for better supporting child care and breaking up utility monopolies?
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Don't knock childcare support. The National Domestic Workers' Alliance has a real vision for the United States that regards the whole economy as a caring economy. This is not trivial. Children and the elderly are actually our nation's greatest job creators. The only problem is that they cannot afford to pay for the caregivers who do the work of caring for them. WE CAN CHANGE THIS. We can tax every OTHER kind of wealth that is less important than caring for our fellow human beings. And as it turns out, ALL other kinds of wealth are LESS important than caring for our fellow human beings.
Don't knock anti-monopoly action, either. The main reason why we are unfree is that too few people own too much of the world's wealth and use their economic power to gain political power, which they use to gain even more economic power, and on and on in a vicious cycle.
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But if it's "big ideas" you want, I've got some of those, too.
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TOWARD AN AMENDED CONSTITUTION FOR THE POPULAR REPUBLIC OF MIDDLE NORTH AMERICA
I often advise all readers of my FaceBook page to “say what ought to be done, repeatedly, until it becomes a thing that can be done.” Since I believe in following my own advice, I present herewith my recommendations for amending the Constitution of the United States of America to transform it from an elitist republic to a democratic one.
I have one COUNTER-recommendation. By the power of advertising by no less powerful oligarchs than Charles and David Koch, millions of US-Americans mistakenly believe it would be a great idea to impose limits on the number of times legislators can be elected. I reject this idea absolutely. Any Constitutional amendment that eliminates both Mitch McConnell and Bernie Sanders at once is worth zero in my book.
Now, let’s proceed to the amendments that I LIKE and that I WANT to recommend. Not a single one, to the best of my knowledge, was ever advertised by an oligarch.
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1. The "Corruption Equals Dollars Divided by Donors" amendment. Obliterate the Citizens United (against Hillary Clinton) v. FEC decision ("Corporations are Actually People"), as well as the Buckley v. Valeo ("Money is Actually Speech") decision.
2. The “You Have the Right to Vote and neither the Federal Government nor Any State Government Has the Right to Take it Away” amendment. If you are a citizen of the Popular Republic of Middle North America, then the federal government should have the responsibility to send you a unique identifying card marked with a unique identifying number that you receive no later than your eighteenth birthday. This card and number should stay the same for your whole life and should grant you the right to vote no matter where you live. If you ever lose your card, the government should have the responsibility to send you a new one, free of charge.
3. The "Neutralize the Inexcusably Elitist U.S. Senate" amendment. (3a) Divide your state's population by the population of Wyoming. The result, times two (dropping any fraction), is the number of U.S. Senators your state should have. Alternatively (3b): divide your state's population by the population of Wyoming. The result equals the number of votes each U.S. Senator from your state should have in the U.S. Senate.
4a. Admit Puerto Rico to the United States as a U.S. state, following a referendum supervised by the U.N. Alternatively (4b), allow Puerto Rico to be an independent country, following a referendum supervised by the U.N.
4c, 4d, 4e, 4f &c. Repeat for every U.S. territory. Maybe some First Nations would like independence or statehood, too. The only territory that we must not allow to become independent is the Douglass Commonwealth, but this one should become a US state immediately. Once we have established that not states but PEOPLE should have equal rights, everything becomes easy.
5. The "Let the People Choose the President, Abolish the Electoral College, and Reform the Stupid, Antiquated, and Grossly Unfair Presidential Primary System All at Once" amendment. Let the Presidential primary elections and the general election be folded into one single ballot with Instant-Runoff Voting. Let everybody, in every state, vote on the SAME DAY, and let the election results be published only AFTER the counting is DONE. Basically, I am trying to imagine how we would elect the "Leader of the Free World" if we actually gave a whoop about doing it fairly.
6. The "Make the U.S. House of Representatives Fair and Un-Gerrymanderable, as it Should have Been in the First Place" amendment. Basically, let the seats given to each party be mathematically proportional NOT to the number of districts the party wins, but to the number of VOTES it receives. There are several ways to do this math and preserve regionality. Just LOOK at some other countries that use proportional representation. There are over a dozen ways to do proportional representation, and they ALL work better than the broken U.S.-American apartheid system. I personally prefer the mixed-member proportional system that the Federal Republic of Germany uses. Good-bye forever, gerrymandering!
6a. Once we have repaired the House of Representatives, we may consider just abolishing the U.S. Senate and transferring all of the Senate’s powers to a unicameral Congress. The bicameral system was designed by an elitist and variously prejudiced minority of wealthy, bewigged white gentlemen who loved their privileges (such as the right to enslave other people) and wanted to make it very hard for any “lesser” people to take these privileges away from them. We should make it easier for the U.S. Congress to do what it is supposed to do: Create newer, better laws and abolish old, bad ones. Gridlock is not a guardrail against error; it is a barrier against progress. Our lawbooks are chock full of bad laws that we cannot get rid of because forty U.S. Senators have the power to veto the other sixty Senators. Have I mentioned that the filibuster needs to go? It needs to go, by Constitutional amendment if necessary. A certain minority of legislators should have the right to demand time for debate, but this time must be shorter than forever. Shutting down the government on purpose should NEVER be an option.
6b. We should also consider eliminating or at least reducing the President’s power to veto any federal law. This is only another barrier against progress. The solution to bad laws should be a new U.S. Congress created by voters who punished bad legislators by voting them out. I would allow a Presidential veto to do only two things: (1) to decrease spending on every budget item by the same percentage, so as to avoid adding to the national debt, or (2) to avoid enacting a law that is obviously un-Constitutional. The first kind of veto (1) should not allow the President to pick and choose which parts of a law to keep and which to cut, but it should require the President to do some math. The second kind of veto (2) should require the President to make some sense out of the Constitution.
7. The "There is No Such Thing as a Non-Partisan Statesman, so Let's Bring Some Sorely Needed Balance to the U.S. Supreme Court" amendment. Expand the Supreme Court to maybe twenty-nine Justices. Give them limited but renewable terms of office: maybe six years, maybe eight years, maybe twelve years. I don't really care about the exact length of a Justice’s term. I just don’t want to leave it to the Grim Reaper to decide how we should interpret the Constitution.
8. The "We Should Never have Given Presidents the Power to Pardon their Own Criminal Bosses and Accomplices" amendment. At a minimum, no President should ever have the power to pardon anybody in their own administration or in any administration they served under in the past. Let's not leave any "Gerald Ford" loophole open. We should be too smart for that.
9. The "Let's Make it a Whole Lot Easier to Impeach a President" amendment. I think a simple majority in a joint session of both chambers of the U.S. Congress should be able to eject a criminal President with one vote, provided that everybody in this majority agrees that the Vice President can step in and take the President's place. Ditto when the Vice President gets booted from office and replaced with the Speaker of the House.
10. The “Let’s Regulate Our Militias” amendment (of the 2nd Amendment). If we’re going to allow each state to have its own militia, let’s require each state to regulate it. And let’s impose some minimal requirements for ALL states. If you’re in a militia, your state needs to register you and your firearm by name, and you should wear a badge that displays your name whenever you march around with your firearm. Nobody should ever be allowed to conceal a lethal weapon, especially if it can kill from a distance as easily as a firearm can. And every state should be required to impose requirements on militia membership, including but not limited to the requirement to pass a test that proves that you can safely handle every firearm that your state allows you to carry.
11. The "Let's Not Have Any More Slavery at All" amendment (of the 13th Amendment). No more penal slavery, no more for-profit prisons.
12. The "Let's Not Have Any More Torture at All" amendment (of the 8th Amendment). All punishments must be NEITHER cruel NOR unusual. And all interrogation of suspects and prisoners by government agents must likewise be cruelty-free.
13. The “Let’s Have Another Franklin D. Roosevelt” amendment (of the 22nd Amendment). We have reversed a Constitutional amendment before. The 18th Amendment, established in 1919, was repealed by the 21st Amendment, which was established in 1933. The President at that time was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was, in my humble opinion, the GREATEST PRESIDENT we EVER had, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. Also in my humble opinion, any limit on the number of times We the People of Middle North America may choose to return the SAME person to the SAME public office if we really LIKE this person is an insulting and uncalled-for limit on our freedom. Shall we reflect for a moment how many ways we would all be better off if we could have elected Barack H. Obama to the office of the Presidency a THIRD TIME in 2016? Shall we? REPEAL the 22nd Amendment.
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*This list of proposed amendments can be extended, but the rest of my ideas are less specific.
*14. I think that every monetary penalty imposed by the government must be made proportional to the personal wealth of the person whose violation incurs the penalty.
*15. Likewise, I think that the distribution of taxes should reflect the distribution of personal wealth among taxpayers. That is, taxes should generally be “progressive.” Consumption taxes should generally be imposed on things that we want people to consume less of, such as alcohol and fossil fuels.
*16. I think the government should have the responsibility to pay for public news media that do not replace commercial news media but do have the responsibility to keep them honest. Democracy cannot survive if millions of people believe things that are not true and most news media owners don’t give a hoot about this as long as they make money. Public education must not end when mandatory schooling ends. Citizens in a democracy need to be well-informed for their whole lives.
*17. I think we need to formulate a principle of Information Justice, such that we establish a floor for Personal Privacy and a ceiling for Institutional Secrecy.
*18. Intellectual property definitely needs both a floor and a ceiling, too. For example, copyrights and patents should exist and should be defended, but they should also be well-defined and should not last forever.
*19. Nobody should profit from selling or managing health insurance; this should be managed by a non-profit institution, preferably by one that is responsible to the voters. Maybe nobody should profit from offering education, either. For-profit schools that charge tuition are illegal in Finland. Maybe they should be illegal here, too.
*20. Isn’t there a better, fairer, more efficient, and more convenient way for elected officials to gauge public opinion than by logging phone calls? For crying out loud! In connection with universally valid voter IDs, there should be universally valid channels of voter communication with their elected representatives. It should be very easy for not only hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of voters, on the regular, to sign electronic petitions, each of which would reliably provide their representatives with a solid number of verifiable signatures that would represent real people and not robots. And while I’m dreaming here, I would like to be able, some day, to be able to add my name to on-line petitions WITHOUT instantly inviting hundreds of politicians to dump fund-raising solicitations in my InBox, please and thank you very much. What would electronic political engagement be like if it were organized as a democratic tool rather than as a scam? Come on. What century is this, anyway?
2026, February 20, Friday
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This is wonderful. I wish I had the skill to write it out like this.
Thank you
I have multiple reactions to this. One thing I want to get out of the way right off the reel is an objection to the characterization of 2016 H. Clinton as promising a "well-managed status quo." That would have been a fair description of her '08 campaign but by '16 she had learned some things and was talking favorably about deep reforms, like making repeal of Taft-Hartley a priority. She was promising Obama's 3rd Term, running on More Fairness and Less Suffering. And if Obama was not a transformational President, neither was he a custodian of the status quo. I say this as one who did not like her in '08 for basically the reasons you describe.
There. That's off my chest.
As for Project 2029, yes the deep-thinking progressive eggheads should bring it, but it would be well to not expect too much. I wrote a lengthy comment elsewhere about that yesterday. The tl;dr is, Democrats will be 100% occupied with putting out fires and performing triage and trying to get vital systems working again. They will have 2 years to bring More Fairness and Less Suffering to people who have finally seen the fruits of Republican governance with the safeties disabled, and if they succeed at that maybe they get a bite at the apple of fundamental reform.
You were watching a different Hillary Clinton in 2016 than I was. Yes, she was promising Obama’s third term. That’s the problem. As much as I like Barack Obama as a person, overall his administration fell way short of what I had hoped for when he was elected in 2008. Your ideas of “deep reform” are possibly my ideas of “pathetic little tweaks.”
I will go to my grave with one central message how to reform the US political system, which can be distilled to five words, END BIG MONEY IN POLITICS.
In my book, I broke the concept into three phases that anyone can remember.
BEFORE – Primarily, Campaign Finance Reform. Limits the candidates and outside money (PACS) to contributions ONLY from citizens, ONLY in small amounts.
DURING – No Insider Trading by ANYONE in federal government. Require every member of Congress have their investments in a blind trust. This would be enforced by the DOJ, upon recommendation by a police agency that watches for infractions.
AFTER – No goodies and treats after you leave office. NO lobbying by former members of Congress. No law job that functions as lobbying. No cushy job as a lawyer getting overpaid as a way to circumvent bribery. For a decade after you leave office, your income will be scrutinized for the appearance of impropriety. The standard does not have to prove intent – just the look of a payoff. If you don't like the idea of being under a microscope for a decade after you leave, don't run.
Pass and enforce those three, and everything else on your list is unnecessary or possible. Because everyone in Congress will be honest, or tap dancing with a term in federal prison. And the vast majority will be working for the people, not the people with money. And that changes everything.
YES! I strongly agree, though it might be too late to reverse the downward spiral. But major Parties are dependent on Big Money, so neither will do anything to really change that system.
IMO, the first step is to push Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) or Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This can be done at the State level; it doesn't require Constitutional Amendments or any other obviously impossible steps. True multi-party elections would force R's and D's to [at least] promise to address problems like Money in Politics, where our current Two-Party system (enforced by First Past the Post voting) encourages negative campaigning and Culture War posturing.
I can't guarantee that RCV will fix everything (or anything…); but I really doubt that the current system will allow any progress.
Timid half-measures are precisely where both parties want to have the debate. That's why I opened with a five-word description of the reform theme. Three different major pieces of legislation based on that theme would dam the flow of big money.
The basic concept can be fit on a a business card and appeal to voters on both sides of the aisle. The crisis of corruption is the main impediment to reform on a host of critical issues. Solutions exist, but they die in Congress if they don't make fat cats fatter. "End big money in politics." is a litmus test of whether a candidate is working for the voter or the donor class. It's truly an either-or. The politician who thinks he can please both is lying to himself and us.
I wish I had a dollar for every idiot who thinks term limits are the answer. Both parties are promoting reliable candidates to serve in Congress. "Reliable" = bought and paid for. Both parties have an ENDLESS supply of corrupt candidates. Term limits will change nothing.
Ranked choice is great – so are citizen-funded elections. Both of them together can't put a dent in the legalized corruption of recruiting members of Congress to multi-million dollar jobs on K Street that start a year and a day after they leave office. The job may start the first day it's legal, but they sold us out years before they moved into a cushy office a few blocks from the Capitol Building.
About a century ago, U.S. senators were appointed, not elected. They liked it that way. It changed when the pressure of an Article V Convention was almost certain to change the Constitution anyway. SO Congress passed the 17th Amendment, which the States would have passed. Congress does not like that the States have power through Article V that Congress would prefer did not exist. The point being, when Congress sees change is inevitable, they do it and pretend it was their idea.
The trick is to make the change clear, popular (to the point of inevitable), and then it will happen.