Reforming our govenment
A couple months ago, I posted a blog entry asking how you'd rewrite the constitution. I've given it some more thought and I've got two additional ideas.
1) Divorce the executive from the legislative. Right now, the executive branch and the legislative branch are not fully separate. I'm not speaking of the VP being President of the Senate. I'm talking about both branches having the same two parties. My first suggestion is to mandate that the office of president (and perhaps governor/mayor/other elected executive positions) would have a separate party system. That would mean (among other things) that the RNC or DNC can't endorce a candidate. Congressional members could feel free to espouse their opinions about various candidates but congress (or portions of congress) could not endorse specific candidates. The eventual parties for the executive branch could have no ties and/or influence over (or be influenced by) the parties involved in legislative elections.
Effects: At first, the effects would be minimal. This would occur for several reasons. People often move between the executive and legislative branches throughout their political career. The system wouldn't be started in a vacuum, so almost certainly one of the new parties would be affiliated with the Republicans and one affiliated with the Democrats. However, in the long run I think you'd start to see a real divergence. I think you could actually run as a successful Presidential candidate on a small government platform if you didn't have the baggage of your party to weigh you down with pork (in fact, that's what I envision the two parties looking like, one big government and one small government). This would more closely align the executive candidates with the issues that are important for them .Rather than pro-choice or pro-life, which really isn't influenced much by the President's opinion, you'd have interventionist or isolationist? Big government vs. Small government? etc.
2) Make political donations non-deductable (for taxes) unless they're anonymous: You'd need to set up some third-party monitoring/tracking mechanism to ensure anonymity. But once that's set up, there'd be a real financial incentive to give anonymously to candidates (basically, you could give 30-50% more and still have the same tax impact). The third party tracking group could ask some basic front end questions (that could be opted out of) regarding the donators views and opinions so that the numbers could be aggregated and reported to the candidates (candidates would still need to know the position of their constituencies) but no one individual (or group of individuals) would have any "markers" to call in. Sure, there'd be people who would tell the candidates that they donated some money last year. But there'd be no way for anyone to actually KNOW that that was true. As a result, for every 4-5 people that played it straight, you'd have 1-2 people that lied to candidates. As a result, candidates would have to take every alleged donor's claims with a grain of salt.
Effects: An overall reduction in political giving. I certainly don't view this as a negative... particularly if it could be supplemented by a renewed interest in public campaign financing. Second, it would eliminate (or greatly reduce) the number of people actually commanding time and political "markers" with the various elected officials. Finally, it would force candidates to focus less on expensive fund-raising dinners and more on broad appeals to their constituencies.
Anyways, those are my thoughts for the day... Have a good one.
