Hey Dems House members: You say you want ethics reform? Here's a SIMPLE plan:

[Stinky The Clown]

Publicly Financed Campaigns.

Just three little words.

Easy, huh?

Take a dime/go to jail.

Give a dime/go to jail.

Now go and work out the details.

And as an aside, since the Republic Party has opened the door on gutting the Constitution, find a way around the 'free speech' thing to eliminate totally the third party ads like the racist one that recently ran against Harold Ford.

Make the elections fair and don't limit, but rather, eliminate COMPLETELY the ability of big money to buy the government.

[Monkeyman]

1. To easy

[Totally Committed]

2. A great place to start! -- I'm proud to be the first "recommend" to this thread!

Banning agents from K-Street lobbyist firms and special interests from the Capitol and Senate hallways would be another good thing to do.

TC

[BootinUp]

3. I'd be happy for starters with a reduction

in the contribution cap. I seem to recall some dicussion on that last year. Cutting it in half.

Has anyone ever seen a poll on publically financed campaigns? I am curious about how popular that is.

[Cosmocat]

4. At the very least ...

quit with this disingenious notion that "free speech," as well as the right to lobby somehow means that CORPORATIONS and SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS or pacs can contribute money ...

That would pretty much do it ...

[Stinky The Clown]

5. That's a reasonable compromise measure ..... but why not go first for the whole ......

..... magilla?

As far as contributing money, it can still happen, but in a far more limited way. For example, allow lots of **personal** contributions in the primaries and don't have public financing then. Treat them as what they are - party functions, not government functions. That said, even here, NO corporate contributions or 'bundled' personal contributions (which are, in effect, corporate contributions).

Once a candidate wins the primary, he goes on the public dime.

Minor party and completely independent candidates would be on the public dime from the start if they meet some given set of criteris. I'll leave the details of that up the legislators, but it might be as simple as petitions, the cost for which the candidate would bear under financial guidelines similar to those for party primary candidates.

[OzarkDem]

6. DLC will fight it

They'll join the GOP in either gutting it or watering it down. While I'm not hopeful of any meaningful reform, at least we can make the DLC and GOP members go on record opposing something the public will support.

[Jai4WKC08]

7. "find a way around the 'free speech' thing"???

Are you serious?!

Honestly, this is something I've gone round and round about in my head. I WANT the big money out of political campaigns. I think public financing may be the way to go.

But free speech is probably THE most fundamental of our rights; how the hell do you just throw it away? Do we have a democracy at all without the free expression of ideas?

The only idea I've been able to come up with is to return to something like the old equal time law, and apply it to the 3rd party groups. That is, don't limit a citizen's ability to say whatever he/she wants, but require the medium to carry the opposing message of the same duration at a comparable time. That way, if I'm willing to spend a million bucks for a 60 second spot, what I'm really buying is $500K for 30 seconds I can use, and $500K for 30 seconds the other guy gets. And not just TV and radio. If I publish flyers, then I have to pay for an equal number to be designed by the opponent's advocates. I'm not sure how it would be negotiated and regulated, and I could see it really getting complicated with right and left-wing talk radio, or especially partisan news... like Fox or Democracy Now, but also CNN, MSNBC etc... who says which ones are partisan and which way? But so far it's the only idea I know of, and there has to be some way to at least make a start.