It's funny how you have to petition to have lawmakers pay attention to an issue, when by definition, those people are there to represent the interest of the majority in the first place.
So put a cap on how much you can donate, and ban corporations from donating. Only individuals should be able to donate. I don't care that they think they need $100 million to get elected, and with this they'd only get $10 million. The point is their competitors will only get by with that much, too, but in a much fairer system, where the voices of many more people have to be listened to, instead of just the voices of a few.
If an organization wants to petition its members to donate to a campaign or political action committee, go for it. But it cannot coerce, it cannot apply punitive measures to members that do not donate, and it cannot be a religious institution that receives tax-exempt status.
Tax-exempt religious organizations such as churches can (but often don't) have their tax-exempt status revoked for urging their congregation to vote for specific political candidates already.
The first, is typically called 'bundling'. An organization, say PETA, organizes a donation drive and encourages its members to make their personal contributions to campaigns PETA has researched and through such bundling the donations have a clear statement of why they were made and what policies are important to those donors.
The second, is an organization donating its money politically, effectively increasing the net donation impact of its members. (as they can donate to the organization and still donate individually)
The argument against the second situation still allows for the first. But conflating the first and second is begging the primary question of whether organizations themselves, in their limited-rights-having-but-clear-non-person status, ought to have their own right to political speech.
Because we can deny organizations the right to contribute directly without denying them the right to bundle. And such a situation would actually massively multiply the power of organization itself: as engaging an increasing number of voters becomes more important than being able to convince a small number of wealthy backers to contribute increasing sums of money.
The only real hedge against this is a return to a constitutional government that doesn't have the power to grant special favors. That opportunity has long since passed.
Why should people living in Florida have any say whatsoever into the affairs of people living five thousand miles away in Alaska? Why vice-versa? How does that make any more sense than people in London having a say in the lives of people three thousand miles away in Boston?
Nevertheless, people in Florida are able to exert control over people in Alaska, and vice versa. That seems incredibly absurd to me, what do they share beyond a common language and currency? Even the distance between Portugal and Finland is only half of that, and the EU is rather different than the US Federal Government.
If we all needed to band together to increase our military might in order to keep razing hoards of Canadians at bay, then I may see the need for it, and clearly the importance of common travel and trade agreements cannot be overstated, but right now our system enables politicians elected in flyover country to tell people living in Portland what they may or may not do in the privacy of their own home. The opposite is equally unfair. Where is the value in that?
These are different communities, different regions, different societies being forced to play politics with each other. If we need to start sacrificing the quality of the democracy (reducing representation per individual) in order to keep a system so absurd running smoothly, then it should be downsized.
Chop it all in half, or more, until the size of it resembles a more reasonably sized country. Two to four federal governments instead of one would make more sense. Representation per individual could increase back to previous levels without resulting in deadlock.
Lest I come off the wrong way, my problem is not that the Federal government is strong, but rather that the Federal government covers a regions and people too diverse. I'm not a "state's rights" nut, just a Cascadia nut.
Don't get me wrong, there are several things I think the government needs to do including managing the economy, maintaining military/ law enforcement just to name a few.
But then you have a congressional hearing about steroid use in baseball. We have government tell us what we can and can't do with our own property (cell phone unlocking, etc). And I think, is that what we pay these guys for? They can't even balance a budget because their scope is way too broad.
I agree that government needs to be downsized, just maybe in a different way.
I've actually thought for some time this is an area the tech community could make a positive impact addressing the inefficiency of a small focused interest prevailing against a much larger, but unfocused public interest.
Thinking more like if 100M people contributed $1 to fund politicians that protect the public interest.
I've written some of the code -- but since that time I've learned a lot more so I will probably scrap what I have to rebuild.
Nowadays you don't want a PAC. You'd probably want to set up multiple organizations including perhaps a 501(c)(4) and definitely a Super PAC expenditure-only committee, which is far more useful than a traditional PAC because it can conduct unlimited independent spending in favor of your preferred candidate (or against your non-preferred candidate).
Traditional PACs, by contrast, can only give $5,000 to a candidate -- they're more useful if you're a company trying to lobby a congresscritter. Their scheduler is going to check to make sure you've given before deciding whether to set up the meeting with the boss, etc. Not as useful if you're an advocacy group trying to influence elections.
well how about phone unlocking? I struggle to see the case for having locked phones.
My first cut would be an appeal like 'the phone companies are trying to steal money out of your pocket. It's un-American. You should be free to do what you want with you phone.'
If you want to truly OWN your device, you can pay fair market value for it, and get service from whoever you want.
Paying $200 instead of $600 is covered by the two year contract you sign with a carrier to get a subsidized phone, during which you pay them back the cost of that subsidization. If you leave early, an early-termination fee ensures that the subsidization is paid for.
At the end of your two year contract, you've paid back the full cost of the phone, and you should be able to treat it as Yours in every sense of the word -- even if that means unlocking it and taking it to another service provider.
I'm not sure I see the issue here - if you want the unlocked phone, then buy it and pay for a SIM only type contract, or do such things not exist in the US?
Do you have a source on that? I can't find anything about such an exemption; I'm fairly certain it doesn't exist.
Locking the phone doesn't affect the subsidy payback one way or the other.
In an ideal world, you would be able to choose what your taxes were used for. While filing taxes, you could select:
NASA: 10%
GREEN ENERGY RESEARCH: 10%
<CITY> ROAD MAINTENANCE: 10%
and so on..
Just a fantasy. Please don't bash me for imagining having taxes at all 'in an ideal world.'
I heartily support the freedom to unlock one's own phone and so forth, but I'd bet $5 that the majority of people haven't thought about it that much and think carrier lockin is an acceptable price to pay for 'cheap' phones. Just because everyone you know agrees with you doesn't mean you form a majority; it just means you're part of a clique.
Probably since overriding a veto is a lot harder than getting one more Senator to vote for the bill, which means the President has more say in what makes it into law than any individual legislator.
He admittedly does have a huge bully pulpit. A defined legislative role. And he does personally lean on representatives. But the US has absolutely nothing equivalent to the organization and party discipline that countries. And "President" is an individually elected position by the country, and has no particular relation to his party other than "(very prominent) member".
A sitting President is always the head of their party.
My understanding of US political parties says that they do not have a rigid structure nor a single head. Indeed if you look through the section on the structure of the Democratic Party on Wikipedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_States... - really, go look) you won't find Barack Obama's name anywhere in that section.
The President has a huge bully pulpit. He is in charge of one of the 3 branches of government. The public hears and sees the President.
But the President does not run the party.
The president is a member of the executive branch, not the legislative branch. He signs bills into law in his authority as an executive who will be responsible for carrying out the laws that the legislators write, not as a legislator responsible for creating those laws.
You absolutely cannot say that he is "lawmaker number 1", because he's not even a lawmaker. The fact that most presidents happen to have served as legislators (senators) previously is irrelevant; that was their job then, and this is their job now.
He is not the head of his party. Nor is he the one who dictates how they will (or should) be whipped - the President isn't even supposed to have any say in the process of whipping votes - that falls on Reid, Pelosi, etc. (who actually have the resources to whip legislators, since they can make promises of campaign money, etc.)
We live in an era where the power of the executive has been illegally expanded well beyond what it was originally intended to be - we can thank Bush and Obama for the bulk of that (at least most recently). But that does not actually change the role that the president has (or should have) in legislative matters.
America has never in its history operated according to the ideal. It's just easier to become informed in America in 2013 than it was 150 years ago, so the discrepancies between the ideal and the realpolitik are more obvious.
I guess this boils down to whether you find manipulating the realpolitik to be more or less effective than trying to eliminate it.
Referencing a specific ability the President has which might qualify him as a 'law-maker' is at best a factoid in this conversation, especially because it doesn't even apply to the petition that we are discussing. The President's ability to classify drugs has little to do with banning/allowing phone unlocking (and one would be hard-pressed to apply a general label of 'law-maker' to the President based on a single power, which might better reside with Congress).
Also, where do I show a lack of abstract thinking? Where do I say that I agree with the President having such power? Are you assuming my response of, "Cool, but that's not what we are discussing here" is akin to, "I don't want to discuss this because I agree with it?" That would be a pretty huge leap to conclusions (if that's what you're reading into).
TL;DR - The President does not fit the generic term "law-maker," except for (maybe) very specific instance(s), none (that I know) of which apply to this situation.