On American Democracy

The American political system was once the most radical system known to man. In an age of kings, we formed a government based around the idea of democracy. Sadly, however, those times are long behind us. The political system in our nation is very slowly falling further, and further behind other democratic countries. Our system has become corrupt. Elections are typically won by those who can spend the most money on it. Politicians who have done terrible things have been re-elected simply because voters have too short an attention span. These are but a few of the ills facing our modern political system. They need to be changed.

To begin, I actually want America not to go forward, but to look to its past to help repair the flaws in our current system. I want to bring back, and then modify, two of the ideas presented in the 1912 platform of the Progressive Party. These ideas are referendum, and recall.

The idea of a referendum is that every citizen who votes can decide on whether some proposed bill would enter into law. I feel that this is truly the best way for America to deal with thorny issues such as abortion. Who better to decide if something so controversial should be legal than the people? However, even this by itself could have problems. This would simply create laws that could be ruled unconstitutional, and therefore overturned. Instead, I call for an amendment to the Constitution to make laws passed by referendum on a national level to be immune from challenges in the courts, and that they can only be overturned if another referendum does as much. This way we can create laws, and if the majority of people disagree with a law, it can be changed. Congress would initiate the resolution to place a referendum on the ballot across the nation. I further propose that two-thirds of both houses would be required to pass this resolution. While this may seem unlikely that two-thirds of Congress could agree on an issue, that is not truly the case. Let me use abortion as my example. Congress is about evenly split on whether to protect or outlaw abortions. So, if a bill was introduced to create a referendum to outlaw abortion, it would be passed. Why? People on both sides of the issue would believe that their opinion would prevail across the nation. This vastly improves our system by putting more power into the hands of the citizens, and makes everyone feel more empowered to truly change America.

The idea of recalling elected officials should also be extended to positions in the federal government. Members of Congress, and even the President would be subject to this. If a certain percentage of people signed a petition to remove someone from office, an election would be held to decide if they truly should be removed. This vastly improves accountability, and forces politicians to listen to their constituents. All conservatives, just imagine: you could have voted Bill Clinton out of office!

Other areas of our political system need improvement as well. One place that is in need of serious attention is that of campaign financing. Right now the person most likely to win any election is the person who has raised the most money. They can better expose themselves and their ideas to the citizenry. This, however, is not fair. We need to end private financing of campaigns. It has been ruled that giving money to political causes is a type of "speech" and is thus protected by the First Amendment. This though, is absurd. It means that a rich person, company, or organization has a larger say in our government than me for example. This is outrageous and must not stand. An end to private financing of campaigns would do a world of good though. In a publicly funded campaign, everyone would be on equal footing, from the Democratic nominee to the nominee from the Communist Party of America. It would allow smaller third parties to grow and actually have some relevance. This in turn ensures that many different views are shared in political discussions. An obvious issue that could be a problem, is how to decide what is a political party. The answer to this is to look at all the 50 states, and see what parties they recognize. All of these are then recognized as parties, and would receive monies for presidential, senatorial, and house races. If a new party wishes to emerge, they would do so by simply getting onto the ballot in any state. A final note is that if a candidate is that of two parties (i.e. Republican and Conservative), they would only receive money from one of the two parties, not both.

These are but a few of the things that should be done to better ensure a truer form of democracy in America. There are many more out there, and these are simply the best that I have imagined.