LETTER: Response to “What parts of the Constitution would you change…”

“Exactly what do you hope to achieve? What are your specific goals? What parts of the Constitution would you change, how, and why?”

Speaking personally, what I believe is absolutely essential for our country, which needs a constitutional amendment to achieve, is to get money out of politics. Specifically, this means to get every private, corporate, union, foundation, pac group, super pac, 501c3 . . .dollar . . . out of every public election for every public office in the country.

The only part of the constitution I would change would be to add an amendment, according to the process established by the original constitution, providing the full and mandatory public funding of every public election for every public official and every public referendum in the country, and this to better ensure that American citizens owned the process whereby their own representatives and their own public policies are selected.

The “Why” of all this has become increasingly evident to ordinary citizens in every political category. Political offices belong to the public, by its citizens, by all of us. Today in the USA every significant public political office is either owned outright, or heavily influenced by non public private interests which have bought the political process by purchasing (financing) each and every election.

Elections cost money. Billions are spent. Most citizens have little left over from the essentials of life and taxes to fund the ongoing (24/7/365) electoral process. Others have billions to spend, as well as having their own private interests before every public body at every level from the local planning commission to the Federal Internal Revenue Dept. Currently, this is all legal, OK but stinks like a road killed skunk.

The always thin veneer of respectability, of paying for “access”, or paying for a “hearing” or even “having a place at the table” has been long since been overtaken by the raw power, and sophisticated use, of money to serve its own interests. The examples are legion.

How easy would it be to make a list of every private parochial interest that was delivered by a public body after having been the recipient of private dollars? Ordinary citizens have been “priced out of the market”. They should not be, we should not be. It is our government, our elected representatives, our laws, and our public policies.