Congress Is Broken - Reform Is Needed

The following is just part of an op-ed at MSNBC.com by Jessica Levinson:

Many of us watched a legal hearing last week to determine whether a sitting member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., helped to incite an insurrection and is therefore constitutionally disqualifiedfrom appearing on an election ballot. While her testimony was jaw-clenchingly infuriating for a number of reasons, perhaps the biggest takeaway is that we need to examine how we got here in the first place and how to make sure we never, ever end up here again. . . .

Real electoral reform, of course, is not easy, but there are some big changes we can make to fundamentally improve our elections and hence our political system.

First, we should drastically limit the influence of money in our elections. Candidates should be elected because they have the best ideas, not the biggest campaign war chests. The public should be confident that elected officials are beholden only to their constituents, not their donors. And the public should have representatives who spend their time working for them, not dialing for dollars. Instead, members of Congress can spend 30 hours per week on fundraising, which is often necessary to finance our very costly elections. For context, the total cost of the 2020 elections topped $14 billion.

If we want to get money out of politics, we should recognize that money is not, contrary to the Supreme Court’s conclusion, the equivalent of speech. And it therefore can be limited in elections.

Second, we should pass real voting rights protections on the federal level. Once people are eligible to vote, we should not make them jump through pointless hoops to exercise that right. Laws that restrict the right to vote by making it harder to register to vote, reducing early voting hours, restricting the locations of voting centers and making it more arduous to obtain a vote-by-mail ballot do not serve legitimate purposes. Proponents claim they help reduce voter fraud, but we know that is a myth.

Third, we need more basic civics education. A representative system of government is based on an active and informed electorate who understand how our government functions and demand that those whom we choose to represent us support our norms and laws, rather than seek to undermine them.

In short, if you find your dentist applying sugar directly to your teeth, it is time to get a new dentist and probably to rethink how we choose our dentists to begin with. If you find your lawmaker in a legal hearing to determine whether she is constitutionally barred from running for office because those charged with making our government work are trying to undermine it, it is time to rethink our electoral and political systems.