The Independent View: The Plan to Reclaim Our Representative Democracy

From their website:

The Plan to Reclaim our Representative Democracy

Our framers gave us a "representative democracy" – what they called, "a Republic." But that Republic was to be representative of all of us. Congress, as Madison said, was to be "dependent on the People alone." And by "the People," as he explained in Federalist 52, he meant "not the rich, more than the poor."

We have allowed Congress to betray this fundamental commitment. We don’t have a representative branch “dependent on the People alone.” Instead, we have a Congress “dependent on their funders” as well as “on the people.”

That dependency produces a government obsessed with the interests of “the rich more than the poor” – since obviously the rich are the funders. Less than 2% of America gave anything to any political campaign last year. The top 100 gave as much as the bottom 4.75 million.

The Solution: Different Election Funding

We are launching a project to recruit Americans across the country to help convince members of Congress to be the leaders they were elected to be – by supporting fundamental reform of the way campaigns are funded.

That sounds like an impossible task.&nbp; But the solution is actually quite simple.

Right now, members of Congress must raise huge sums of money to win elections. And that requires spending 30–70% of their time raising money from wealthy donors and special interests. The incentives are clear: more money = higher chance of getting elected. And more money comes from pleasing their donors, creating a system of cronyism.

To fix this, we need to change from whom our representatives are raising their money – and with that change, we will change how they raise their money. That change will require legislation – just legislation. A statute, requiring just a majority in Congress to enact it.

So they built this new platform to help you contact undecided reps with ease. Your call could be the tipping point that makes an undecided rep step up and support fundamental reform in Congress this year.

They have 148 reps already. That means they are just 70 votes short of a pro-reform majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. That’s it. They aren’t saying it’s going to be easy to get 70 more votes on their side, but it isn’t the impossible task so many chalk it up to be either.

Congress isn’t going to fix the system of corruption out of the goodness of their hearts. Reps need to be told by voters to step up and lead.

Now is the time to do it.

CLICK HERE to find your reps. and make your calls.