Threaded Discussion 10-01-03

I disagree about how the “private funding of Congressional campaigns is poisonous venom in American politics” because it is a free country people should be able to fund their campaigns if they have the money.  The whole idea of having the campaigns funded by the different parties is for the people who could not afford the campaigning.  This means that they have to “take a loan” for the funding so that they can get into the Congress.  When they borrow the money from the parties, then there is the whole debt thing.  This is where the person would have to repay the party for their favor.  This normally means that they have to agree with some views that the parties pose.  Sometimes this can be a bad thing, so I believe that private funding would help the people campaigning be more for the ideas that they stand for instead of having to be controlled by the party they are being supported by.  America should stand for freedom.  We should not have to be controlled by the rich who support us, especially in elections to help decide our future.  Term limits are a good idea so that everyone who wants to be in Congress would have a chance to be in Congress.  Yes there are some times when there is a really good person, that supports the people and is always working to make us happy, but this person will not last forever; therefore, they might as well just serve his/her term and then pass the baton on to the next person. It is not like there is no one out there that can make America better than it is.  This would give people the opportunity to change the country for the better.  This would help rule out the selfish politicians that make their service a career.  If a company wants to donate money to a campaign that they see would benefit them, it would be okay.  It is not always necessarily right, but it should not be condemned because this world is not perfect.  Perhaps they will support someone for the better, but that is a very rare case, but it is always possible. 

Response – Discussion

I definitely agree with you on the beginning about how it should not matter whether the money comes from a private party or the big parties. I never really thought about it, but I do agree that we should be able to know where the money is coming from. We should have a right to know where the candidate is getting the money to campaign without the help of the rich democrats or republicans. This would help in deciding who we should elect. It is also a good idea to be able to drop the person from the race because they will not identify the source, this would help get rid of the “lies and deceit”. When people run for anything in our government their lives should not necessarily be private or will not be private; we should be able to know a lot of things about them. We have a right to know who is running our government. I suppose that term limits could be bad because, yes, it is true when change happens people go crazy. Sometimes the elections are for the better, but like this last presidential election it was a horrible election because we had a great president, and now we have a “great” president (sarcasm). Sometimes the term limits would help get rid of the bad government officials. Sometimes they get re-elected and people do not realize how much they are destroying our country.

Sadly it is true that there is no real way to control any of this. There is always going to be that one bad seed that messes up the good system. It is only human nature for people to be evil. That is the way that we are. Sometimes people overcome the evil in them, and others just stay “evil”. Many times it is the politicians that are the evil ones; ironically, they are usually out there in the races just for the money because one could be very rich by this. That is why they should have a term limit.