The former president has always considered himself to be the ultimate disrupter. But this time, the disruption is on the other side.
Through the weekend, there were an awful lot of questions that were going back and forth from people in the president’s tightest circle, and one of the questions that kept being asked was whether Joe Biden was going to endorse Kamala Harris or not. And the question didn’t revolve around whether he wanted to or not, but whether people in her camp thought it would be better for her to fight for it, win it on her own, and not be seen as somebody who was tapped by President Biden and so, in her own way, have a fresh start going into the campaign.
So the timing seems to be about as good as it could have been to end what has just been one of the craziest two or three weeks in American politics in quite some time.
I still find it strange that this is considered “late in the election cycle”. We need legislation limiting campaign length to something reasonable.
Free speech pretty much means you can’t stop someone from advertising for themselves or a cause just because it isn’t close to election season. I don’t disagree with you at all, but this is going to be a constitutional no go, I think.
Free speech can be limited if you have a good reason. For example, if you don’t want people to see how their food is raised, you can just ignore key constitutional freedoms…
Yup. The ag-gag laws seem to be a huge carve-out - if that can be managed, I don’t see why we don’t start limiting the election cycle, too.
Totally.
We have freedom here, and yet our elections are like 2 months long, start to finish (including hand-counting ballots from that one day of voting). My polling place is a mason’s hall about a block away that they convert to a polling station with some cardboard boxes and folding tables.
What are you referencing?
Feels like you could go after it from a campaign finance angle, not that those laws are particularly restrictive as it stands.
Agreed. What about an inflation adjusted campaign budget for each elected position? I believe this system is already used in some countries.
I feel like this would promote a focus on policies/platforms and encourage good faith campaigning.
Citizens United determined that money is speech though.
I think most people agree that was a harmful decision though.
Absolutely. But you can’t un-ting that bell, not without a constitutional amendment.
I really don’t know. We’d have to pass it as a law and then see if it survives challenges. Better question is does either party have the political will to make it happen?
Campaigning is not a right. Postal employees can’t run for office, for example.
I’m really not invested enough to disagree, here. If someone can make it happen, great. I think it might not pass constitutional muster but I’m not on the Supreme Court so what I think doesn’t matter.
You could be right, who knows. But that would basically invalidate the entire Hatch Act, which would be wild. But Hatch is too restrictive in my opinion anyway.
They could regulate campaign donations, like when they are allowed to be made. Or maybe when those funds are allowed to be accessed. Maybe that would help.
Maybe the access. I don’t know about the donations, though. It’s already been ruled that donations are speech.
I’m not against the idea if someone can make it happen.
I guess this just reinforces the problem with Citizens United. All that free speech is infringing on everyone’s free speech.
You aren’t wrong.
It’s sorta like how “Christmas season” feels earlier and earlier every year… I’m a Grinch until Thanksgiving, and a patriotic non-partisan until Independence Day, thank you very much.
There is absolutely no reason why we need to run primaries so far in advance. They should all be in May or June. As far as I can tell, the only reason the schedule is like this is because some states want the influence that comes with being earlier in the process. But why should Iowa or New Hampshire always get that?
Presidential Primaries should be held over 4 or 5 consecutive weeks, with a rotating roster of which states vote in which order.
Why not like all in one week? Or one day?
Fuck it, liquid democracy.
Allow candidates to be picked by the nation without first building momentum in some of our most regressive states?
I live in Indiana and every year our national primaries are useless. All the nominees are determined by May and it leaves me with zero enthusiasm by that point.
i think we should force campaigning to be entirely done on paper. Forces thing to the rich only, but aide from entirely banning campaigning, and somehow dealing with that mess, i’m not sure how well that would go.