Reform Campaign Finance
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- Alan K. Simpson, former Republican Senator from Wyoming
If the need for comprehensive campaign finance reform was not already clear, the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United permitting unlimited corporate and union spending in campaigns certainly made it so in 2010.
”The Facts
- In elections for the House of Representatives, 90 percent of the candidates who spend more money than their opponents, win their elections. For U.S. Senate contenders, more than 70 percent were the winners in every election since 2000.
- The rising cost of elections is getting worse with time. The Georgia Senate race between Herschel Walker and Ralph Warnock set the all-time record at $425 million. In the 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the total spent was $343 million.
- Today’s politicians spend as much as 50 percent of their time raising money for the next election.*
The Solutions
- Only people who can vote should be allowed to donate money to campaigns.
- Prohibit out-of-state money in state elections.
Nick Penniman, “Time Spent Fundraising in Congress,” C-SPAN, January 4, 2018, accessed February 12, 2023, https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4706765/time-spent-fundraising-congress.
A Bold Plan For America
The importance of an informed citizenship has never been higher than in today’s environment of misinformation. In this book, I’ve broken down America’s 14 biggest problems and provided nonpartisan, fact-based solutions on how we can solve them.
