Democracy's Daily Posts from

Mail Bag
We get a fair amoung of comments e-mailed to us. Most are pretty interesting. Here's a recent one that I thought I'd share with readers:

Dear The Rest of Us,

I read the article on Commondreams by Derek Cressman entitled "It?s Time
to Cap Runaway Campaign Spending" and of course agree with it heartily.

I have had a proposal on the wire for years http://www.28amen.org/ to
limit campaign finance and refer you to it now. The idea is to obviate
the Buckley vs Valeo problem by amending the Constitution.

It now occurs to me that voting and campaign finance reform must form
the nucleus for the Third Way that is so obviously required to bring
back representative government to the United States.

The idea is that the argument for a transparent, repeatable count for
all elections (http://evm2003.sourceforge.net/) and the legislated
equality of all campaign contributions can be presented independently of
"political philosphy".

One may remain a Libertarian, a Green, a Conservative, a Liberal, even a
Republicrat-Demoplican and still work for these essentially mechanical
reforms of the political process itself.

I imagine a Mechanics' Party, whose membership determines not to solicit
or offer contributions in excess of a week's wages at the minimum wage
to any candidate for office and whose candidates pledge to work firsrt
and foremost for vote tallying by a human verifiable medium as well as
for campaign finance reform.

Mechanics may be members of any political party they see fit, but will
campaign for other Mechanics and will work as hard to warn their
neighbors of the danger presented by the other, bought-out candidates in
any election, and will campaign against them.

Please found a Mechanics Party in CA and work to elect your fellow,
unbought Mechanics in the coming election in 2006. It is possible to
return representative government to the United States of America.

--
John Francis Lee