Republicans in Congress will try to pass a stopgap spending bill this week to avert a partial government shutdown and keep the government running through September, though they’ll need Democrats’ help to do it.
The 99-page stopgap spending bill, which House Republicans released over the weekend, is required since lawmakers haven’t made any progress conferencing the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.
The continuing resolution, the third since October, would fund the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2025 — marking the first time since fiscal 2013 that Congress has leaned on stopgap spending bills for the entire year, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
I think your concerns are valid assuming you stop there, but there’s definitely a lot more that can be done on top of campaign finance reform to make politics more egalitarian and protected from corporate interests.
Once upon a time in the US, the FCC enforced the Fairness Doctrine, which required any radio or TV broadcaster to represent bipartisan or nonpartisan views on given topics if they wanted to discuss politics. Not to say that it didn’t come with its own set of problems, but Reagan did away with that in the 80’s and we’ve seen a right-leaning slant in radio and TV ever since.
Just spitballing here, but a similar model with campaign finance in mind could do a lot to level the playing field. First, do away with corporate personhood. Then make it so that if a broadcaster or advertiser wants to show political ads, they must obtain a special designation which comes with its own stipulations: limit the quantity/duration of ads any one campaign can purchase, require that they distribute any qualifying candidate’s ads without bias, charge a flat rate for ads for all candidates, and all political ads must be divided up along regular intervals throughout the day.
Despite corporate personhood, it is possible—common, even—for corporations to be limited in what they can or cannot say. Limiting corporate speech for public good (HIPAA in the US, for example) shouldn’t be something objectionable.
Probably not perfect, but also probably much much better than how things are today with so much corporate-controlled politics.
Just spitballing here, but a similar model with campaign finance in mind could do a lot to level the playing field. First, do away with corporate personhood. Then make it so that if a broadcaster or advertiser wants to show political ads, they must obtain a special designation which comes with its own stipulations: limit the quantity/duration of ads any one campaign can purchase, require that they distribute any qualifying candidate’s ads without bias, charge a flat rate for ads for all candidates, and all political ads must be divided up along regular intervals throughout the day.
I agree with all of this. But part of the problem is that exactly none of this applies to social media. You couldn’t apply this to social media even if you wanted to. And that’s where a lot of people get their news and information today. Your suggestion absolutely should be applied to traditional media like CNN and Fox News. But how could you possibly apply that to Youtube? Twitter? Facebook? How does that apply to those who choose to (or “choose to”) advocate for their preferred candidates independently? These are the people that politicians will be chasing, which will give wealthy social media influencers more political pull than they have now. You could be making the problem worse.
Yeah, definitely an additional dimension that would need some sort of out of the box thinking to address, and I don’t think it could ever be done perfectly given that the internet is an international community not beholden to any single country’s laws.
In one sense though I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue of people posting whatever opinions and endorsements on social media, but more to do with the algorithm. No idea what could be done about that, but can’t say I’d be against some sweeping reforms hitting social media platforms anyways to address user privacy, which might at least address the algorithm problem somewhat.
That, or, we hope decentralized social media like this catches on at a larger scale, haha.
The algorithm won’t matter.
Look at it this way. Magical new campaign finance laws are in place. What kind of a chance do you think you would have in an election where your opponent has, one way or another, secured the endorsement of a multi-billionaire like Elon Musk, several influential celebrities, or whatever who are willing to independently (or “independently”) endorse your opponent? Would you think your chances are good if all you have available to you is your government-issued war chest? The Elon Musks, Taylor Swifts, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons of the world are going to reach millions upon millions of people regardless of Youtube’s algorithm. So of course everybody is going to want to secure those endorsements if they want to even have a chance.
And under these new laws, it’s presumed that voters will no longer be contributing to campaigns. So why on God’s green earth would a candidate even bother listening to voters at all any more? Several decades of political history have already shown that politicians value the desires of their wealthy donors far, far more than the voters. And that’s with voters contributing to their campaigns. What do you think will happen when they have to choose between the wealthy celebrities who would be essentially funding their campaign through the back door and the voters who collectively contribute $0? Your concerns will no longer matter. They know that even if they lose the vote of the 20% of people who are informed and pay attention to politics, they’d be able to rely on celebrity endorsements to deliver votes from the 80% of uninformed voters who couldn’t care less about politics 99.9% of the time. Your vote would be worthless to them, easily replaced by probably 3-4 votes from some uninformed rubes who just voted for whoever their celebrity of choice told them to.
Like I said, you would literally be making the problem worse. The wealthy donor class would have even more influence than they do now. Social media influencers would see their political influence increase, leading to the rise of even more social media politicians like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. What comparatively little influence the average voter has would evaporate.
I am all for campaign reform. But I’m not for short-sighted solutions that look good on paper but make the problem worse in practice. And not only are the solutions being discussed be blatant violations of the freedom of speech, expression, the press, and the right to petition our government, which is something that I am dead set against, but they would also be easily exploitable by Trump or someone like him, who’s already starting off the ball game on third base. Like you, I don’t know what the solution to any of this is either. But I do know that this isn’t it.
