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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

Sure, let's pretend congress won't do what they are paid to do.

We really have no chance on this issue, the interests in seeing works enter public domain simply aren't commercial enough to supply the requisite lobbying dollars.

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Well, then the answer is to stop voting for people willing to take lobbyist money, and for those that were already elected, make a public stink over it.

This is so naive that it sounds like a joke or a parody.

You can only say that without knowledge of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Prior to that I'd have agreed with you. It was tremendously successful at fundraising from small dollar donations by pushing policies that benefit the many over the few. I don't see a reason why other campaigns can't pick that up and run with it.

That was one guy amongst 536 politicians. And he lost because a corrupt system scuttled his campaign.

That is true, but the 535 other politicians are nearly all centrists or right wingers. Politicians are beholden to their donors. Eliminate the elite donor class, eliminate their interests being represented. I have some optimism that the Democratic party will be reconfigured to some degree. It's either that, or keep losing cyclically.

FDR won four presidential elections and scared the right so badly that they got a constitutional amendment to limit future "damage" to two terms.

So, GP says "Vote for people who aren't interested in taking bribes" and you say "eliminate the donor class" -- those seem like pretty distinct policy recommendations. How are they related?

GP's literal words were "stop voting for people willing to take lobbyist money". The lobbyists and big donations / bundlers come from the same class of people - the wealthy. These dollars come attached with policy positions that favor that class both explicitly (in terms of policies that are explicitly favored) and implicitly (policies that will not be given strong support, i.e. various forms of redistribution).

The only way to run a modern political campaign is with lots of cash, so the cash must be procured somehow. Your two options are to level the playing field with public funding of campaigns (unlikely to happen in the wake of Citizen's United) or for a candidate to raise small dollar donations. The Sanders campaign proved that the latter is possible.

What you said can be read as "the answer is to stop voting", because it would be very very hard to find someone that doesn't want to become filty rich.

And if you find one, well... one person can't do much in politics.

I’m so glad with how well all of the checks and balances in the constitution against the ruling of the minority over the majority worked /s

The Constitution has no checks against that. The founders had the opposite fear and largely detested popular democracy and the "rule of the mob". It is functioning as designed.

Edit: role -> rule

Godel (the logician of Incompleteness Theorems fame) almost failed his citizenship exam (or whatever it is called) for pointing out that there’s almost nothing you can’t do with a 2/3 majority in Congress. Apparently the functionary was on the verge of rejecting his application for having made an accurate observation but some higher power dove in for a last-minute save.

http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2012/02/guerra-pujol-o...

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