The fight is not over who occupies the office. It is over the rules that make the office worth capturing.
If political power reliably converts into private wealth, you will eventually attract people who are optimizing for that conversion. Replacing one officeholder with another does nothing to the conversion rate. Change the payoff and you change who runs.
None of what follows depends on which party you belong to. Every item constrains whoever holds power, including the people you voted for.
Mark the reforms you would vote for. Your count appears at the bottom of the page.
Concentrated ownership of what people see is a real structural problem, and the collapse of local reporting is measurable: the country has lost more than a third of its newspapers since 2005, and roughly 50 million Americans now live in a county with one local news source or none.
But no government should get to decide what is true, what is fair, or who gets to broadcast. That power would be captured the same day it was created, by whoever won the last election. So this section stops at disclosure. Not what may be said — who is paying to say it, and whether a machine made it. Sunlight, never a licence.
Every one of these has to be passed by the people it would constrain.
That is the whole problem. It is also why pressure has to originate outside the building — through state ballot initiatives, primary challenges, and sustained attention on a specific vote rather than a general grievance.
Being precise about difficulty matters, because vague demands are easy to ignore and specific ones are not.
- StatuteMost of this list. An ordinary act of Congress does it: stock trading, disclosure, the revolving door, lobbying transparency, small-donor matching, independent enforcement.
- EnforcementForeign money is already illegal under 52 U.S.C. § 30121. The STOCK Act already requires disclosure — the penalty for violating it is a $200 late fee. The gap is prosecution, not legislation.
- AmendmentCapping independent expenditures runs into Citizens United and SpeechNow. Congressional term limits run into U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton. Both need a constitutional amendment or a reversal by the Court.
Sign the citizens' ballot
A signature here is not a vote and carries no legal force. What it does is make the number visible — to a representative, a local paper, a state legislator weighing a ballot initiative. Numbers are the only argument that reliably travels.
You are signature #1
A number nobody sees changes nothing. The list only matters if it grows — send it to one person who would argue with you about it.
Your name is on the wall below.
Signatures are public: your first name, last initial, and state appear on the wall below. Your email is used only to stop the same person signing twice. It is never displayed, never mailed, never shared.
Your marked ballot count is submitted with your signature. Nothing else is collected, and no email is ever sent.
Who has signed
None of this is left or right. It is inside government against outside it.
A reform agenda that opens by naming villains stops being a reform agenda. This one names rules.
ONE CITIZEN. ONE BALLOT. ONE SET OF RULES.