{"id":401,"date":"2012-06-04T22:27:07","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T04:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/?p=401"},"modified":"2012-06-04T22:28:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-05T04:28:00","slug":"401","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/?p=401","title":{"rendered":"Montana and Corruption"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/06\/04\/opinion\/an-invitation-to-keep-money-out-of-politics.html?_r=3\" title=\"An Invitation to Keep Money out of Politics\">New York Times editorial<\/a>, Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) illustrates the past which necessitated anti-corruption laws:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In 1899 [mining tycoon William A Clark] decided he wanted to become a United States senator. The State Legislature appointed United States senators in those days, so Clark simply gave each corruptible state legislator $10,000 in cash, the equivalent of $250,000 today.<\/p>\n<p>Clark \u201cwon\u201d the \u201celection,\u201d but when the Senate learned about the bribes, it kicked him out. \u201cI never bought a man who wasn\u2019t for sale,\u201d Clark complained as he headed back to Montana.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What I found particularly interesting, though, was how similar it was to an old gem I wrote some time ago:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Pay will be dependent on votes. Salary of Congressmen will be scaled down with each non-vote. That includes a vote of &#8220;present.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Any campaign money received prior to 3 months before the election will be considered a violation of election law, subject to prosecution. <\/li>\n<li>Any money received in excess of the maximum individual contribution of $10 will be considered a bribe, subject to prosecution. <\/li>\n<li>Any money received from any entity that is not a citizen of the district a candidate wishes to represent will be considered a bribe, subject to prosecution. <\/li>\n<li>While in office, the congress member shall generally be allowed private meetings only with constituents. The constituents&#8217; names will be logged. The name of every non-consitituent seen by the congress member shall be logged and the meeting shall be recorded.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>(Unfortunately, I have not yet reformatted my older posts to fit the WordPress format)<\/p>\n<p>It seems that the Confederate wing of the Republican Party can have their States&#8217; Rights and eat them, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent New York Times editorial, Brian Schweitzer (D-MT) illustrates the past which necessitated anti-corruption laws: In 1899 [mining tycoon William A Clark] decided he wanted to become a United States senator. The State Legislature appointed United States senators in those days, so Clark simply gave each corruptible state legislator $10,000 in cash, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.desertscope.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}