A Tale of Two Parties

While in the GOP, the deposed Majority Leader is pleading ignorance about Jack Abramoff and corruption, calling the repeated charges of ethics violations "baseless" and mnade up by a "liberal press," the Democrats are attacking the root of the problem:

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin and Sen. Chris Dodd, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, said yesterday that they will push for public financing of federal elections.

The revelations follow public financing proposals that two senior House Democrats unveiled late last month.

Rep. David Obey (Wis.), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, announced Jan. 25 plans to reform dramatically the funding of House campaigns. Under their proposal, taxpayers would be asked to contribute voluntarily to a national campaign fund.

Congressional observers largely dismissed Obey and Frank’s proposal as a political gesture, but Durbin and Dodd’s support for public financing of elections makes the concept more viable.

This is the only way to reform the corrupt system in Washington, and these incumbent Democrats should be lauded for breaking out of the retrenched Beltway wisdom of "this'll never work" and actually moving in the right direction. While Republicans whine and plead innocence, Democrats want to do something about it. This should be a bipartisan call from the grassroots on up to have clean money elections. This will help Democrats, this will help Republicans, this will help the people. This would return voters to the political process. The only people it wouldn't help are lobbyists and interest groups. They would be emasculated.

Which may be why the GOP is lining up against it. Even their "mavericks."

The public financing of campaigns does not have — at least to this point — the support of the Senate’s leading advocate for campaign-finance reform, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

McCain dismissed the proposal yesterday with a flat “no.”

“We’ve only had BCRA for one election cycle,” McCain said, referring to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

Of course, McCain comes from Arizona, where Clean Money elections are already in place, and he praised the system in his state as recently as 2002. They called that "flip-flopping" in an earlier time.

This is fabulous news, that Democrats are coming out strongly for public election funding. It's the only way to get the money out of politics.