I am happy that in 2018 the House and Senate passed a campaign finance reform bill. Unfortunately, they left many loopholes that should have been closed. I don’t understand why, but normally there is a reason you leave loopholes.
The hardest thing to believe is that before this bill if you were in office and raised money for your campaign then it was considered your personal money! I can just imagine how many politicians got rich off of these contributions. The bad part is that a big portion of their contributions come from PACs and Lobbyists. This is like buying a politician with a retirement fund.
If you look at current members in government that are still there today some have millions in their accounts. I am dumbfounded on how this ever came to be. There is no wonder we have corruption in politics when you have regulations like these that are easily taken advantage of. The legislature had a chance to clean this up but only did the job halfway and left other potential opportunities for misuse.
For one they shouldn’t have exempted campaign contributions from before 2018. That gave them the out to capitalize on the campaign money they already had in their accounts. Campaign money should be used for campaigns and nothing else.
Another point of contention is that they opted to let members contribute their campaign money to other candidates, committees, and organizations. Why would they exempt these? If you go look at the campaign filings of our politicians here in the state, you will find If they have been in office over two terms they all get either most or a big portion of their money from PACs and Lobbyist. You can see in their filings that these politicians give each other money out of their campaign funds. Just about all of these politicians get money from the same PACs and Lobbyists.
Ingalls, Merck, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, and many more. If corporations are only allowed to give a thousand dollars then this could be considered a workaround. If one politician gets a thousand dollars from one of these corporations and then donates money to another politician then it could be construed that the donated money from the corporation is going to the other candidate above the thousand dollar limit. I can’t think of a good reason why the legislature left this in the bill.
Candidates giving each other money from their personal funds should be okay but giving money to each other that came from the same PACs and Lobbyists they are already receiving money from should not be okay. Why can’t politicians just consider the people first?
Campaign money should be used for “campaigns” and nothing else. People donate to the person they like, corporations donate to the people they think they can control. Let’s get back to basics and try to get people to trust politicians again. Like in 1774 for the first continental Congress where our Republic got its start. Pretty sure it had a better approval rating than the one we have now. Let’s Make Congress Great Again! Give power back to “we the people”
Get rid of ALL machines and go to paper only ballots! Yes, Donald Trump won in Mississippi but as Captain Seth Keshel has discovered there was fraud in Mississippi. He has done extensive research, as that is what he did in the Army, on logistics in all states and trends in voting. He does have a website and is originally from Mississippi.