It’s Time to Clean Up Missouri Politics: About the CLEAN MISSOURI Ballot Initiative

Today I had the privilege of attending an informational meeting regarding the CLEAN MISSOURI ballot initiative. The organization will be finished collecting signatures in a few weeks, and is on target to having the initiative on the Missouri statewide ballot this coming November. Who could possibly be against a Ballot Proposition that will read exactly like this:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to: ● change process and criteria for redrawing state legislative districts during reapportionment; ● change limits on campaign contributions that candidates for state legislature can accept from individuals or entities; ● establish a limit on gifts that state legislators, and their employees, can accept from paid lobbyists; ● prohibit state legislators, and their employees, from serving as paid lobbyists for a period of time; ● prohibit political fundraising by candidates for or members of the state legislature on State property; and ● require legislative records and proceedings to be open to the public? State governmental entities estimate annual operating costs may increase by $189,000. Local governmental entities report no fiscal impact.
Here is the Policy Summary. Here is the actual text being proposed for the Missouri Constitution. Here is the website for Clean Missouri. If you would like to get involved in this effort, contact Campaign Director Sean Soendker Nicholson at sean@cleanmissouri.org.

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When the issues are more about tribal identity than the merits of the issues

To what extent are the issues really about the merits of the issues, rather than about tribal identities? Zaid Jilani's article at The Intercept nails it. The title: "A NEW STUDY SHOWS HOW AMERICAN POLARIZATION IS DRIVEN BY A TEAM SPORT MENTALITY, NOT BY DISAGREEMENT ON ISSUES."

THE LOOSE CONNECTION some voters have with policy preferences has become apparent in recent years. Donald Trump managed to flip a party from support of free trade to opposition to it by merely taking the opposite side of the issue. Democrats, meanwhile, mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for calling Russia the greatest geopolitical adversary of the United States, but now have flipped and see Russia as exactly that. Regarding health care, the structure of the Affordable Care Act was initially devised by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented in Massachusetts as “Romneycare.” Once it became Obamacare, the Republican team leaders deemed it bad, and thus it became bad. Mason believes the implications of such shallow divisions between people could make the work of democracy harder. If your goal in politics is not based around policy but just defeating your perceived enemies, what exactly are you working toward? (Is it any surprise there is an entire genre of campus activism dedicated to simply upsetting your perceived political opponents?) “The fact that even this thing’s that supposed to be about reason and thoughtfulness and what we want the government to do, the fact that even that is largely identity-powered, that’s a problem for debate and compromise and the basic functioning of democratic government. Because even if our policy attitudes are not actually about what we want the government to do but instead about who wins, then nobody cares what actually happens in the government,” Mason said. “We just care about who’s winning in a given day. And that’s a really dangerous thing for trying to run a democratic government.”

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Libertarianism as Not-Politics

David Masciotra of Alternet explains why Libertarianism is not actually a political movement, and why it is actually a "childish sham".

Ayn Rand is the rebel queen of their icy kingdom, villifying empathy and solidarity. Christopher Hitchens, in typical blunt force fashion, undressed Rand and her libertarian followers, exposing their obsequiousness toward the operational standards of a selfish society: “I have always found it quaint, and rather touching, that there is a movement in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” Libertarians believe they are real rebels, because they’ve politicized the protest of children who scream through tears, “You’re not the boss of me.” The rejection of all rules and regulations, and the belief that everyone should have the ability to do whatever they want, is not rebellion or dissent. It is infantile naïveté. As much as libertarians boast of having a “political movement” gaining in popularity, “you’re not the boss of me” does not even rise to the most elementary level of politics. Aristotle translated “politics” into meaning “the things concerning the polis,” referring to the city, or in other words, the community. Confucius connected politics with ethics, and his ethics are attached to communal service with a moral system based on empathy. A political program, like that from the right, that eliminates empathy, and denies the collective, is anti-political.

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Trump exposes vulnerabilities of the U.S. Constitution

At the U.K. Guardian, Jonathan Freedman writes the following in his article, "The year of Trump has laid bare the US constitution’s serious flaws":

I once thought the US constitution – a document crafted with almost mathematical precision, constructing a near-perfect equilibrium of checks and balances – offered protection against such perils. And there’s no denying that that text, as interpreted by the courts, has indeed acted as a partial roadblock in Trump’s path, delaying and diluting his Muslim-focused “travel ban”, for example. But this year of Trump has also shown the extent to which the US has an unwritten constitution that – just like ours – relies on the self-restraint of the key political players, a self-restraint usually insisted upon by a free press. Yet when confronted with a leader unbound by any sense of shame – and shamelessness might just be Trump’s defining quality – America is left unexpectedly vulnerable.

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