Heck and Esenberg: What’s Worse, Campaigning or Campaign Reform?

For Jay Heck, the disease needs a cure. For Rick Esenberg, it’s doubtful there is a disease and, even if there is, the cure is worse.

If Tuesday’s “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall had been a meeting of foreign diplomats, the statement afterward would have described the session as “cordial but frank.”  Two of the most prominent Wisconsin voices in the debate about whether to and how to regulate money spent on political campaigning presented their views with wit and warmth, but with no masking their widely different positions.

Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, said elections in Wisconsin and nationally had devolved over the last several decades and regulation of election spending was a matter of restoring confidence in the political system.

Esenberg, a professor at Marquette University Law School and an attorney involved in a case currently challenging regulatory plans in Wisconsin, did not accept that the damage being done by current levels of spending was so serious. Limiting free speech related to elections presents, among many things, a constitutional problem and is a bad idea that often has unintended negative consequences. 

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Tea Party Economics

Readers of this Blog know that I have a longstanding interest in the debate over the scope of the federal government’s power to regulate the economy under the Constitution.  I am also inclined to take the Tea Party Movement seriously as a political phenomenon rather than writing them off as a group of buffoons or extremists, unworthy of attention.  For that reason, I read with some interest Kate Zernike’s article in the New York Times  on October 2 that discussed the writers whose books are most often said comprise the intellectual foundation of the Tea Party movement. 

Taking pride of place among the “long-ago texts” highlighted in the article is Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom.  Hayek is often cited by the movement’s followers for his argument that a government that intervenes in the economy will inevitably intervene in every aspect of its citizen’s lives.  If one accepts this premise, it is easy to understand why members of the Tea Party Movement reacted with hostility to the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP), health care reform, and the bailout of the domestic auto industry.  For Tea Party followers, these separate policies – when viewed together — comprise a centrally planned economy reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s infamous Five Year Plans.

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A Modest Proposal for Ending Gridlock in Washington

I have a proposal to vastly improve politics in Washington, and it should have bipartisan appeal—or, at least, it should appeal to one party this year and to the other party 2 or 4 years from now. Given the new practical reality that it takes 60 votes to get anything done in Washington, and that there are never 60 votes for anything useful, it seems like a perfect time to consider a new amendment to the Constitution. It would need to be proposed by a convention called for by 2/3 of the states, as the other method probably wouldn’t work:

RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States
relating to the legislative power.

Resolved by this Constitutional Convention assembled (a majority of the delegates concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States:

Article —

Section 1. All legislative powers granted by this Constitution shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist solely of a House of Representatives.

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