Your Soapbox

Big money too influential?

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

By Chris Fitzsimon

Legislative elections are too influenced by big money raised by legislative leaders. Agree or disagree?

Last 5 posts in Your Soapbox

Email This Post Email This Post Print This Post Print This Post

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 10:29 am and is filed under Your Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

2 Responses to “Big money too influential?”

  1. Jim Stegall Says:
    September 29th, 2005 at 1:47 pm

    In general, I tend to think that the problem is too little money being spent for campaigns, not too much. However, when there are so many restrictions on regular folk as to who can contribute how much, and to whom, while legislative leaders are free to dole out campaign cash at will to their favored colleagues (including using the state budget to do them favors, as we have seen repeatedly), it begins to seem that our representatives are being selected for us by the House and Senate leadership. They certainly act that way once they get to Raleigh. Look how many Democrats who were against the lottery HAD to vote for it because boss Black told them to.

  2. Adam Sotak Says:
    October 3rd, 2005 at 8:17 pm

    Of course money has too much influence on the political process. This fuels a corrosive cynicism in the general public that keeps voters away from the polls and turned off from the political process. Knowing that we’ll never eliminate the influence of big money, we need to work hard to infuse alternative sources of “Clean Money” into the system and provide candidates without access to wealth an alternative source of funds. Here in North Carolina, we’ve already taken a big step with the availability of public financing for judges (NC Supreme Ct and Ct. of Appeals). Now, we need to continue that trend and provide public financing for Council of State candidates (anybody remember Meg Scott Phipps?) and legislative candidates. This type reform could have a far-reaching effect on all the other issues that our government deals with (education, health care, taxes, etc.)