by Frank Kirkwood<\/p>\n
Those who believe the dangerously counter-productive idea that electing more Democrats to Congress will, by itself, bring about publicly funded elections should have a look at the last time the Democrats had control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, in 2010.\u00a0 That year, the Fair Elections Now Act [H.R. 6116\/1826] (a bill similar to the current public funding of elections bills) was approved in committee<\/a> and sent to Speaker Pelosi.\u00a0 The Speaker only needed to speak and the bill would have been voted on by the entire House of Representatives, 165 of whom were co-sponsors.\u00a0 She said nothing.\u00a0 There was no vote.\u00a0 The bill died at the end of the year.<\/p>\n I have not heard any explanation for this.\u00a0 If anyone has, please let me know (TrustworthyGovernment@gmail.com<\/a>).<\/p>\n At least two explanations\u00a0come to my mind.<\/p>\n Party leadership in Congress can provide cover to any member who needs, for political reasons, to co-sponsor reform.\u00a0 These members can easily co-sponsor a reform and have plenty of reason to believe that the day will never come when they will need to actually follow through on their promise.<\/p>\n I think\u00a0the\u00a0most likely explanation is that the bill\u00a0would have failed to pass the Democratic controlled House and many Democrats would have been exposed as not being any more interested in reform that the Republican members (although, to be fair, some Republicans may<\/a> have voted for it, given the chance).<\/p>\n Maybe there are better explanations.\u00a0 But, what we can conclude is that electing more Democrats will not, by itself, lead to real reform.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t then.\u00a0 It won\u2019t now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Frank Kirkwood Those who believe the dangerously counter-productive idea that electing more Democrats to Congress will, by itself, bring about publicly funded elections should have a look at the last time the Democrats had control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, in 2010. That year, the Fair Elections Now Act [H.R. 6116\/1826] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trustworthygovernment.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}