On Politics & Campaign Finance
Overturn Citizens United
The era of One Dollar, One Vote is coming to a close. Wealthy megadonors such as George Soros and Sheldon Adelson are not entitled to a greater share of influence in political discourse because their money allows them to purchase large numbers of 'independent' expenditures to support or oppose particular initiatives, politicians, or to buy politicians by contributing to their campaigns or to their candidate-affiliated Super PAC's. I am ready to have Arizona join 17 other states who have already passed resolutions calling for a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United vs. FEC. As is permitted by Article V of the U.S. Constitution, when 34 (two thirds) of the state legislatures call for an Amendment, and 38 (three fourths) of states ratify said Amendment, it takes effect and becomes the law of the land.
By passing a Constitutional Amendment to overturn this Supreme Court decision, we can allow Congress and state legislatures across the country to pass reasonable restrictions on the influence of money in politics. We know that despite Justice Anthony Kennedy's protestations, supposedly independent expenditures and donations to campaign committees do create the appearance of impropriety with regard to elected officials, even when no evidence of quid pro quo bribery or vote buying can be found. We know that the mere appearance of impropriety, even when no actual impropriety exists, damages the public's faith in their elected officials, and contributes to problems such as voter apathy and low voter turnout, which tilts government and elected officials further in the direction of the wealthy and their special interest bretheren. Economists and political scientists have shown that the views of the poorest 90% of the electorate has statistically no effect on realized legislative outcomes in either Congress or the various state legislatures throughout this country. However, we see repeatedly that the top 10%, and the top 1% in particular, have enormous sway on political outcomes in this country. It is no stretch of the imagination to attribute such a divide to the corrupting influence of money in politics.
When companies are able to increase their profits dramatically by lobbying and donating to politicians' campaigns, that's exactly what we will see. We will get less investment in real growth - fewer innovations, less capital expansion, and fewer jobs, as corporations choose instead to hire lobbyists and invest in rent-seeking behavior, receiving astronomical returns of 22,000% and even 76,000% in some documented cases. It is the government's responsibility to provide a workable legal system and a fair and level playing field for business. Businesses should grow or fail on the basis of their ability to succeed within the system, not on their ability to forge connections with local and state lawmakers and regulators to tilt the rules of competition in their favor, through regulatory capture, as well as by imposing restrictions and requirements that stifle competition. I will push for the strongest possible restrictions to limit corporate influence on the political process, and to work to make sure that the government works for the best interests of the people and the voters, not just the people with the money to buy influence.
The Citizen's Clean Election Fund provides an option for candidates seeking statewide or legislative office to solicit qualifying donations and receive public funding to run their campaign if they disavow donations from wealthy donors, PAC's, and Super PAC's. I am pledging to run my campaign under those provisions. However, the current form of the Clean Elections Commission is inadequate, as no such provisions are available for candidates seeking county, city, and local elections throughout the state. I would like to see the state work with the several counties in order to develop Clean Elections Commissions modeled on the State's, in order to provide a public funding option for those candidates.
I am also pleased to join the efforts led by Representative Ken Clark to force SB 1516, Arizona's Dark Money Bill, to a referendum in the November elections. If you have not already signed the petition to do so, I encourage you to find someone carrying the petition and sign it - we need over 75,000 signatures statewide in order to put this piece of legislation on the ballot in the November elections, and we have a strict deadline at the end of July. If you are interested in joining the fight yourself, I encourage you to contact their campaign by sending an e-mail to: info@stopcorruptionnowaz.com
Reform Ballot Access Laws
The Arizona State Legislature, comprised entirely of Democratic and Republican legislators, has passed ballot access provisions that make it exceedingly difficult for third-party candidates to appear on the ballot and earn the opportunity to have their voices heard in state and local politics. Thanks to the provisions put in place by the Democrats and Republicans, each of the two major parties requires a significantly fewer percentge of its registered voters to sign ballot access petitions than do third-party candidates and independents. While Democrats and Republicans each require about 1 to 1.5% of their respective registered voter base in order to qualify for the ballot in a state legislature race. Greens and Libertarians each require about 10% of their voters. While prospective candidates from any party can seek the petition signatures from registered voters who have not designated a party affiliation to help meet their signature requirements, the major parties still retain sizable advantages in terms of party name recognition, as well as from having a substantially larger base of previously identified voters from whom to seek petition signatures.
Even more worrisome is that people who seek to run for office as a nonpartisan candidate face much higher hurdles than those who run within a political party. While Democrats and Republicans who wish to run for State Legislature in District 3 each require about 300 valid signatures in order to appear on the ballot in the primary election, an independent candidate requires about three times as many signatures - slightly over 800 - to appear on the ballot in the General Election. Such a hurdle helps to ensure that only candidates who are independently wealthy and can afford to campaign with their own independent wealth, those who already hold office, or those who agree to be bought by corporations, special interest groups, and wealthy oligarchs in order to finance their campaign. Such a system helps to ensure that people either have to give influence to a party infrastructure, or to the wealthy campaign financiers directly, in order to have a realistic chance of even appearing on the ballot, let alone actually winning an election. And, at a time when record numbers of people are dissatisfied with the corporate-backed parties, the structure of ARS 16-341 makes it even more difficult for nonpartisan candidates to appear on the ballot, as the signature requirements for independent and nonpartisan candidates increases as people disaffiliate with the four recognized political parties. While ballot access laws have a place, I will propose legislation to streamline the process and adjust the signature requirements to give third-party and independent candidates a fair chance to appear on the ballot, in order to help bring additional viewpoints to the table.
End the Two-Party System
Political discourse is enhanced when we have a wide variety of viewpoints being represented in public office and in campaigns. However, our political system artificially restricts the spectrum of viewpoints to just those endorsed by the Democratic and Republican duopoly. Thanks to our political system and for-profit corporate media, important viewpoints outside of the Overton Window are being suppressed, limiting important alternate viewpoints to challenge the places where the two major parties agree. These issues include pro-corporate globalization, more 'economic incentives' for developers to destroy our land and pollute our water and atmosphere for private profit, increasing privatization of our social services including private, for-profit health insurance and private prisons, more wars for oil and profit, more deregulation of finance and banking, expansion of the police and surveillance state, and expansion of the racist and dehumanizing War on Drugs.
A robust multi-party democracy would require political parties to negotiate and compromise with one another, rather than giving the elected members of one political party with a majority to push through an agenda that only appeals to a small percentage of the population - their donors and the most ideologically driven among them. Our system of primary elections helps to encourage partisanship and intransigence, and coupled with our high number of one-party dominant legislative districts, helps to foster gridlock at the expense of negotiation and compromise in good faith. Over a third of registered voters in Arizona, and a similar number within this district, identify as either independent, unaffiliated, or with a third-party not recognized by the state of Arizona, and yet there is not a single member of the state legislature, any statewide elected office, or a single member of Congress or the U.S. Senate who is not either a Democrat or a Republican. Our current election process provides numerous opportunities for special interests to hijack government for its own ends, partisan idelogues to suppress moderate and independent voices from within their own party from receiving nominations for elected offices throughout the state and the country, and encourages an us-vs.-them, lesser-of-two-evils approach to choosing our elected leaders, as seen prominently between the major parties' presumptive nominees for the Presidency. As part of doing so, I am advocating for a system of approval voting to replace our current plurality-rules system, to eliminate the spoiler effect and give additional voices the chance to seek office without creating a risk that voting for less established candidates inadvertently helps a strongly disliked one. I believe that it is time to end the two party syste which gives so many incentives for people seeking elected office to sell out the poor, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups to wealthy business interests and other moneyed groups. While overturning Citizens United via a Constitutional Amendment is important, without reforming our election system, we will never truly acheive a representative system of government where all groups are given a seat at the table.
I would like to see due consideration given to creating a system of proportional representation for our legislative districts, by consolidating the number of districts and increasing the number of legislators elected from each. I believe that by doing so, we can encourage the growth of smaller political parties and allow for sorely-needed alternative viewpoints in the state legislature. We should not have a system of government where one political party has 36% of registered voters, and yet controls 60% of the seats in the state legislature, while the 33% of registered voters in Arizona registered as no party preference have no representation by nonpartisan candidates whatsoever. While independent voters have a wide variety of different political viewpoints - some tend liberal, others conservative - they share a lack of support for both of the major political parties, and I believe that said voters should be able to support other candidates and to have their viewpoints heard in political discourse. I have chosen to run for office because I believe that we should have a real choice when we choose to vote. Not everyone will support my positions and my platform, and I respect and embrace these differences of opinion. But I believe that we can make our state and nation stronger when we are willing and able to have these real debates and dialogues, rather than limiting the range of 'acceptable' viewpoints to those which conform to the Democratic and Republican orthodoxies.
Defeat Crony Capitalism
One of the most destructive aspects of U.S. policy, at all levels of government, is the role of cronyism in all levels of government - city, county, state, and federal alike. From the Pima County Board of Supervisors giving economic incentives to a company operating $75,000 ballon rides into the stratosphere, to the Legislature giving tax breaks to corporations and business interests based on campaign donations, to military contracts at the national level, cronyism in government is a serious issue. Numerous appointments to high-paying administrative roles and other executive offices are made at the pleasure of elected officials, and are all-too-often filled by political patrons and other donors and influence-brokers, and we the people pay the price in terms of having high-paying positions filled by low-skill, underqualified officials. It is time to move to a system of good governance here in Arizona; while median income in this county is a mere $42,000 per year, many appointed positions are making 3 and 5 times that. At the same time, state legislators make a mere $24,000 that is hardly enough to raise a family on, forcing our elected officials to either seek out additional employment, jeopardizing their integrity and impartiality, or be independently wealthy enough to live on their own unearned income, tipping the balance of power in the state even more toward wealthy individuals.
I propose to reinforce our system of civil-service jobs within the state to ensure that we have qualified and professional workers at all levels of state and local government to carry out administrative and bureaucratic duties on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, I believe that we should take steps to keep the salaries of our administrators in check, to prevent administrative positions from acting as high-paying sinecures for the donors that contribute to our elected officials' campaigns. We should not have the presidents of our state-funded universities making $800,000 per year while we have hundreds of thousands of workers making $8 to $10 per hour. I propose to restructure our government contracts and requests for procurement to include important provisions protecting government and the taxpayers by lock-in tactics pushed by contractors. I also propose to cut corporate welfare wherever it hides, whether in the form of 'tax incentives' given in exchange for lobbying efforts and campaign contributions, subsidies for mining and other heavy and polluting industries which degrade our water and soil, or implicit taxpayer assistance in the form of welfare given to individuals because businesses refuse to pay their workers a living wage. I will fight to prevent members of the Corporation Commission, Legislators, and other elected officials from taking positions as lobbyists for a number of years after they leave office, as well as prevent lobbyists from seeking positions of elected office for the same. And, though it is not always politically popular, we must raise the salary of our state legislators to an equitable salary equal to the median income within the state. Our low pay for state elected officials, consistently among the lowest in the nation for executives and legislators alike, provides barriers to running for office and getting elected, which tips the balance of power in the legislatures toward very wealthy individuals who can afford to 'serve' for little financial renumeration, and toward cronies who put political party ahead of their constituents. I believe that the people of Arizona will benefit from having elected officials who are not bought by wealthy individuals, or who are themselves obscenely rich.
And there is one very simple step we can take to solve many of our issues with cronyism and increase state legislators' salaries without raising taxes or diverting funding from other state resources - Amend the State Constitution and end the Arizona State Senate. Nebraska already has a state government with such a system, called a unicameral legislature, giving us an example of a state government that lacks a State Senate. Further, because State House and State Senate districts fully overlap and are elected at the same time, any benefit that can be gained by having two different elected bodies is nullified. Even worse, the State Senate has served as an opportunity for elected officials and their cronies to end-around the voters' will to push for term limits. Too many of our legislators move back and forth between the House and the Senate on a rolling basis, and the bipartisan gerrymander imposed by the (ostensibly) Independent Redistricting Commission has worked to create as many safe districts as possible for the Democrats and the Republicans, and as few as possible competitive districts that given independents and third-parties opportunities to raise important issues and challenge the two party system.