This is an example of the "you can pay people not to be corrupt" argument. It relies on people who are both willing to be corrupt, and happy to leave money on the table.

It's exactly the same argument as paying for media not to include advertisements.

What we should do is stop filtering for trash by having jobs that pay $174K require multi-million dollar application fees (i.e. a campaign.) That's exactly how you would hire for a job if you wanted to make sure that the primary purpose of having that job was personal enrichment. We talk about being saddled with college debt; we can see the results of being saddled with campaign debt.

How does that happen when your government is run by two tiny private clubs fueled by exactly that sort of personal ambition? It doesn't. Getting a handle on corruption in the US is going to take a lot more than a few tiny adjustments. Especially when the people responsible for making those adjustments would be the corrupt class we would be claiming to fix.

Expecting Congress to fix itself when Congress is composed of the people who were good at this process is bizarre. The best a centrist can do is wait for the courts to fix it.

edit: The court broke it more with Citizens United. It simply doesn't believe that self-enrichment from politics is bad in and of itself. It believes that part of democracy is that the elected person has a mandate to do what they think is best, within the rule of law, and helpfully abolishes any laws or norms that would prevent bribery.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/the-supreme-cour...