Regulating money in political campaigns

Regarding campaign finance there are really TWO aspects of regulating the money in politics.

First is donations to candidates’ campaigns which are currently monitored and regulated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

The second aspect is money which flows through political action committees (PACs) who publish issue advertisements or ads in support or against given candidates while not (ostensibly) working in coordination with a candidate’s campaign. Citizens United (CU) unleashed any regulation on the second aspect of funding. Addressing CU is very difficult given the current Supreme Court. I don’t have a ready answer except we need either a constitutional amendment — or — we need to expand the court with nominations from a president amenable to regulating money in campaigns — or — Congress can legislate the purview of the court and define what it can and cannot review for constitutionality.

Regulating candidate campaign financing:

Congress can easily regulate candidates own campaign financing. One idea I had would be to ban any donations by individuals or PACs to candidates and instead use a public funding mechanism. For example, senate candidates in the general election would each get an even split of the money for their race equal to the population of their state. In Michigan with a population of ten million people. If there are four candidates on the ballot (Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green), then each gets $2.5 million dollars. The FEC can maintain the bank account and literally issue each candidate a debit card and a checkbook to use with that account. All money would be accounted for. No outside money allowed. Not even candidates own fortunes (for those wealthy candidates).

A similar format could be used in a given state for US House races. Michigan has approximately 708,000 people per congressional district. Using the same four party candidate example, each candidate gets $177,000 from the FEC with a debit card and checkbook. No outside money allowed. Not even candidates own fortunes (for those wealthy candidates).

My two examples of Senate and House races specifically pertains to the general election in November. We could still use a similar format for the primary races. The money would just get divided up among more candidates. Any candidate running unopposed would get no money.

In both cases, unspent money goes BACK to the FEC.

(As an aside, for those who do not know, all US House candidates must fill out data on the FEC website at regular intervals and their spending and receipts of donations are all online. Unfortunately, the Senate opted out of this mechanism. They still have to report all the same data, but senate candidates turn in their campaign finance information AFTER the election to the Secretary of the Senate who then has to spend time wading through reams of paper from hundreds of candidates to verify all was spent or received as allowed by law. As you can imagine, very likely misconduct, deliberate or accidental, doesn’t get discovered until months later).