... It is amplification. The Supreme Court got it dead wrong. Money in politics only buys you a louder bullhorn. It is an expression only of volume, not of content, and should not equate to speech. Does somebody with a huge amplifier and speakers have the right, under the constitution, to stand on a street corner and express his opinion so loudly he drowns out everyone else? I don't think the Founders wanted free speech to equate to whoever SHOUTS THE LOUDEST, via big campaign budgets.

Secondly: Instead of limiting campaign contributions, why don't we limit campaign spending instead? Force every candidate to operate within a strictly capped campaign budget, with independant auditing. Pick a reasonable amount - whatever it is, keep it tight, so as to make the spending decisions tough ones. And that is the most each candidate can spend, He/she is free to raise funds up to the spending limit, and spend it however he/she thinks best. It would be fun seeing candidates forced to live within their "means," and record how efficiently they are able to allocate very tight, very limited resources.

Yess..... I know the door would be open for groups not officially aligned with a candidate to create their own media messages, but so what? How is that different from what they do now?

Campaign SPENDING reform ... now!

I like this idea. Combine it with my idea for limiting campaign contributions to only registered voters in each candidate’s districts and you could have a good campaign fiancé system that comes close to serving the public’s interest.

It’ll never pass.

problems. NO contributions is better, because it creates an even playing field where the candidate has to prove ability and resume, not just outspend and outglitz the opponent. We will get better candidates and find out how they spend a budget.

I think it misleading to say that someone gets to shout louder. In fact it is the frequency with which they get to put out their message. That means that it is much more likely that they will reach an individual voter.

When I worked on Ross Perot's campaign in 1992 we found out what it means to have less access to speech. We spent a large portion of our ad budget in Colorado on a 30 minute infomercial. It was to be broadcast at 7:30 on a Friday night on a major TV channel. Unfortunately, 7:30 rolled around and some lame TV show was on and after a number of phone calls to the station we found that the fine print allowed the station to reshedule in case of emergency....they never told us what the emergency was, but they did show our 30 minutes....at 2am. They also did not refund any portion of our money.

I think it is a good idea to try a federal fund for attempting to free us of the influence of those who have lots of money to spend, by distributing donor credits to the voters. I'd make the amount bigger than $25, but no more than $100.

I would prefer a spending/donation cap over a global federal funding program. Or perhaps the feds can be involved by sponsoring frequent regional/national televised DEBATES where candidates must directly answer the question asked or risk not being included in future debates.

I'd be in favor of some sort of CSPAN like allocation of time to each candidate, but how do we decide who to give access to? I would love to have some kind of indicator on the screen when the candidate deviates from the topic or fails to answer the question. A tally at the end of a debate would be pretty usefull. There wouldn't be any real need to punish those who fail to actually answer questions. An independent tally would make for great campaign ads for some.

Carry the bullhorn analogy in the other direction - if no one can hear me speak, have I expressed my thoughts? No. That's why amplification part and parcel of speech. Amplification costs money - how loud do you want to go?

If you have a lot of money, you'll have a lot of amps. But if you have a lot of money from a lot of like-minded people, you'll have a lot of amps, and a lot of votes.

They don't count the amps, they count the votes.