*deadpan* Shocking, just shocking. The congressional fox failed to meaningfully guard the campaign finance henhouse . . . again. At least if we went to a disclosure only system, no party could manufacture rules to benefit itself.

Public Financing of campaigns, are you nuts? The check off box on your tax return is not being used by enough people already to finance president races. Forbes and Bush did the FEC a favor by not seeking matching funds in 1999 and 2000. If you want to donate money to your candidate, you are free to do so. But in order to create your plan, our tax money would allocated to fund more candidates and more parties. Look at Pat Buchanan. The Reform Party had a pot of $12 million in FEC funds to give to whomever was named at the Reform Party convention. Did you the floor fight between Pat Buchanan, his delegates, against the other candidate? People who do not understand the current public financing system seem to be ready to dump it. Full disclosure is now required, and if you look at the donations from the Bush 2004 and Kerry 2004 campaign, the people of our nation donated enough money to finance those races. Plus George Soros donated another $16 million to finance the Dem/liberal groups promoting Kerry. Sorry Dan, in order to clean up politics, you might follow throught with the rest of McCain's plan to give candidates free newspaper space and free TV and free radio time to get their message out. McCain was fix a key problem blocking more candidates from running: getting the millions required by the media in order to buy time to speak to the voters.

Lets put McCain against Feingold. Winner is Prez, secong is VP.

Two men with a record of working with the other party to try and get the job done. Satisfies the centrists of both parties and maximizes the number of Americans actually represented by the department.

J\K below:
Or we could revert back to the tradition of the society from which we draw our roots and have 2 presidents who must both sign a piece of legislation for it to become law.

Re: Gravy's last post on campaign finance:

I believe the only real hope for campaign finance is public financing of campaigns. Without it, the system is screwed.

In regards to the posts about Che--aren't they off topic? Not that I have a problem with it. It gets to my point, you can just skip past any off topic posts if you have something against off-topic posts.
However, in regards to censorship, the American way is to have a rule that off-topic posts will not be allowed on the blog. Chris Cilliza or whoever is responsible for this blog or meesage board did not do that. Therefore off-topic posts are not a violation of the blog.
Personally, posts that attack someone personally are more offensive to me than off-topic posts. Not that I have necessarily seen those, but if they exist, those would be more bothersome to me.

And Feingold brings us back to campaign finance. As Dan stated, with the parties involved there can't be reform, and I think that's mostly true. The exception is when the exceedingly rare leader comes along. To push through real reform they have to be both honest, well intentioned, and charismatic enough to make it a liability for their lesser colleagues not to oppose them. I think this is the case with both McCain and Feingold. Their campaign finance reform was true reform as evidenced by how vastly it changed things. Obviously there were deep flaws (those being large loopholes), but I think that's the fault of their parties being subversive as well as the fact that the issue is so huge and complicate that it's difficult to anticipate all possibilities.

In short, the only hope for real campaign finance is the rare honorable and charismatic leader, but unfortunately they are discouraged from arising by both their parties and the political system.

Gravy: I'm betting CHE is busy obtaining pastable items calling for Bush's impeachment based on the fact that "the president approved release of sensitive intelligence on Iraq."

Makes Russ Feingold look prescient, no?

Can't wait for CHE to paste a long article here about how the Bush Administration is composed entirely of cyborgs.

Yep,

So long as the parties themselves are involved, there can be no true reform.

This is a huge step back regardless of who benefits. It's a shame that something as important as campaign finance reform has to be in the hands of those who have such a vested interest in it, because it will always be used as a tool like this.

Typical slight-of-hand move that defeats any real campaign reform. I am sure th GOP would not have passed it if they thought it would not somehow benefit them.

They are less sure of retaining the House at this point than they are of the Senate.