Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) went after former President Trump for his legal woes in an interview on MSNBC Saturday.
“I’ll take the individual who’s 81 over the guy who has 91 felony counts,” Swalwell said, making a reference to President Biden’s age in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show” on Saturday.
“It’s not about two individuals,” Swalwell continued, speaking about the 2024 election. “It’s about the idea of competence versus chaos, or even greater, freedom versus fascism. If we make it about those ideas, and what they mean in our daily lives, we’re gonna win.”
Swalwell’s comments come after Trump was ordered to pay almost $355 million in penalties in a civil fraud case and amid increased scrutiny faced by the president on his age and memory in the wake of a special counsel report on Biden’s handling of classified documents. The report noted that Biden had problems with memory and recall.
Changing the voting system seems like a vital part of a solution.
Term limits may be anorher.
But the flood of money and influemce delivered by Citizens United has overwhelmed most checks and balances.
Despite how you may feel about Andrew Yang and his presidential bid, one of the ideas in his platform was meant to counteract some of it.
He called it Democracy Dollars and it was $300/yr of earmarked money, sepearte from his UBI money, that was provided to every voting citizen to spend on political donations - candidates, committies, etc. at local, state, or federal levels.
This would amount to over $1T of non corporate lobbying to help balance out the foriegn and/or corporare PAC sponsorships.
Term limits only work if the limits were applied to big money donors. Otherwise, they just end up putting money even more in control.
The trouble is that the people who could enact laws to change the voting system belong to parties that would suffer if the voting system were changed.
States where Referendums are a thing might be a good path forward.