This is Why We Need Publicly Funded Presidential Debates
Once again, a lawsuit brought by the Libertarian and Green Parties against the RNC, DNC and The Commission on Presidential Debates seeking injunctive relief to allow them to participate in the upcoming Presidential debates was dismissed without any hearing on the merits of the case by a Federal District Court Judge yesterday.
[Gary] Johnson and one of his rivals, presumptive Green Party nominee Jill Stein, sued the commission last September, alleging violations of antitrust law and the First Amendment.
Johnson and Stein are seeking spots on the all-important presidential debate stage this fall.
But federal judge Rosemary M. Collyer threw out the lawsuit on Friday.
The complaint filed by the Green and Libertarian parties made three alleged claims. One, that excluding them violated the antitrust laws, specifically Sections 1 and Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Two, that excluding them from the debate violated the 1st Amendment. Three, that the RNC and DNC and the Commission on Presidential Debates, "through their anticompetitive conduct, intentionally interfered with Plaintiffs’ expectations of economic advantages and relationships with debate organizers, sponsors, contributors, and media outlets."
Here are brief summation of the judge's treatment of those claims:
But Judge Collyer said Johnson and Stein's antitrust claims "fail as a matter of well-established law." And she said the First Amendment argument did not apply because the commission is a private nonprofit, not a government entity.
As for the third claim, the Judge wrote:
The claim that Defendants would not permit the Libertarian and Green party candidates to be part of the presidential debates is a “refusal to deal” allegation, one that is insufficient to plead an intentional interference claim as a matter of law.
Some historical context is require to understand why the judge dismissed this lawsuit out of hand. The presidential debates used to be sponsored by The League of Women Voters. The League withdrew from sponsoring the presidential debates in October 1988, for the reasons stated in their press release dated October 3, 1988:
"The League of Women Voters is withdrawing its sponsorship of the presidential debate scheduled for mid-October because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter," League President Nancy M. Neuman said today.
"It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions," Neuman said. "The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."
Neuman said that the campaigns presented the League with their debate agreement on
September 28, two weeks before the scheduled debate. The campaigns' agreement was negotiated "behind closed doors" and vas presented to the League as "a done deal," she said, its 16 pages of conditions not subject to negotiation.Most objectionable to the League, Neuman said, were conditions in the agreement that gave the campaigns unprecedented control over the proceedings. Neuman called "outrageous" the campaigns' demands that they control the selection of questioners, the composition of the audience, hall access for the press and other issues.
"The campaigns' agreement is a closed-door masterpiece," Neuman said. "Never in the history of the League of Women Voters have two candidates' organizations come to us with such stringent, unyielding and self-serving demands."
As you well know, the League's withdrawal was of no concern to either of our two major parties. The RNC and DNC jointly formed a "non-profit" organization, the "Commission on Presidential Debates" that assumed the role formerly undertaken by the League, i.e., sponsorship pf all Presidential debates. Since that occurred no third party candidate, with the exception of Ross Perot, has ever been permitted to appear on the debate stage with the nominees of the two "major" parties that effectively dominate our political system at all levels.
You can read the full text of the Judge's opinion at this link. I can tell you that as a matter of law I was not surprised by this result. Other pasts legal challenges by third party candidates excluded from the debates were consistently denied by the federal courts, whose judges are, of course, selected by Republicans and Democrats. I could break down the nitty-gritty of the legal minutia the Judge's opinion cited as justification to dismiss this lawsuit, but that would not be a productive use of my time. I strongly suspect that we will ever see any court allow any lawsuit by a third party demanding inclusion in the Presidential debates to succeed. Under the law, a judge can always find a justification for the party he or she wants to rule in favor of. In short, even the judicial branch of the government supports the control of the political system by the reigning duopoly.
This is why we need federally funded Presidential debates, or at the very least a crowd-sourced, non-partisan, people-funded debate to which all viable candidates (using criteria less likely to exclude third parties) would be invited. Since the ratings of the Libertarian Party Town Hall were quite high for its time slot, and I suspect the Green Party Town Hall on August 17th will do at least as well, I am of the opinion we could find one network that would be willing to put on such a debate (or I like to think that is the case). Otherwise, absent taking control of the Presidential debates out of the hands of the two major parties, we will never see third party candidates allowed into the their exclusive little debate club of two.
Comments
Thanks for reporting this.
It tossed me into a white hot fury, but then I just realized that all it does is toss another anchor to Hillary's already foundering "SCOTUS" argument.
The judges are rigged, therefore it doesn't matter who nominates them. They will do as they are ordered regardless of the "Platform" they espouse.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
The situation sucks - but
The judge ruled IAW established law and precedence like he/she is supposed to.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Fuck people over long enough...
And it becomes OK, because people have been doing it so long, it's fine.
Had only John Brown understood this, we would never had had the problems with the peculiar institution...
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
It's called "The Rule of Law"
And if you don't have it you have Somalia.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Law does not create justice.
And slavish adherence to the law creates nothing but multiple tiered caste systems where those with the ability to pay have a different set of rules than everyone else.
See: Clinton, Hillary Rodham
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
This is why debates need to be set up on the internet
Invite all candidates to come to these debates. Maybe TYT or some collaboration of internet truth sites can do this at minimal cost and no corporate razzmatazz. Maybe Trump will show up, Hillary probably won't, but there will be a vigorous, informing, unmanipulated debate between Jill Stein and Gary Johnson that will pull in a lot of views.
Beware the bullshit factories.
I'd be all for it
The internet is clearly gaining in political clout, but politics is still an old person's game unfortunately, and they overwhelmingly get their politics from corporate media and pundit views. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large the younger you go the lower the voter turnout. We need a complete cultural shift to stress the importance of political awareness and participation.
I wonder where
the Commission on Presidential Debates
got their 15% threshold number from?
Their corporate sponsors?
Who elected the CPD as the final arbitrators, anyways?
The two parties set it up.
You must have missed it in the O.P. Bipartisanship at is "finest" - ensuring there will never be tripartisanship.
here in Illinois, (R)'s and (D)'s are at each other's throats, but they come together in unison at excluding anyone else.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
15% threshhold
My educated guess says yes -- specifically, the "Big Three" broadcast TV networks and their cable and radio affiliates. If a third party candidate is ;polling 15% or better, leaving them out threatens debate ratings and the profitability of covering them.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
I think 15% is the magic "Exclusion Number"
Since an average of 40% or more DON'T vote because they see the big two as the same...
That's 40% that should be considered, but ISN'T. Instead we are left with only those that are participating. (and often self-select in polls) Which means that Jill Stein is currenly polling at 6% of 60%. Or about 10% of those who are paying attention with a nearly complete media blackout, and Hillary on FULL COURT PRESS against her. Johnson's doing a bit better with 10%, or an adjusted 16.6%. There's none of this full court press against Johnson of course.
So, in a fair contest, Johnson would already be in the debates, and Stein would be as well were there not a full on propaganda war against her. However, the lovely part is that since the media is the one who makes the polls, they're also the ones who can include or exclude whoever they want, based off the idea that the polls are absolute.
Or aren't, because polls are inaccurate, as they are quick to tell us when we point out voter fraud because of exit polls.
Bullshit game, and they know it...
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
I know where they got the 15% threshold from...
they pulled it straight out of their asses.
Seriously though, it was deliberate. Someone with a background in mathematics (which I tend to suck at) could explain how that threshold essentially prevents ANY third party challenger from entering the debates.
The last person to do so was Perot, and he really made a muck of things in the eyes of TPTB. (That was in '92)
They have maintained a Duopoly for about 3 and a 1/2 decades now.
There was a pretty good article on it at Huffpo a couple days ago.
Here is part 1 (that was part 2) of a 4 part series.
"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me
Not just debates
We need federal funding, by which I mean a set, standard, and REASONABLY SUFFICIENT minimum baseline dollar amount of dedicated public funds for each candidate appearing on the ballot, for ALL federal *elections*.
End to end. Get the money out of politics, AND kill two birds with one stone by using the very fact of the high cost involved as a means to bring an end to the perpetual campaign paradigm.
Better yet, provide all candidates free advertising by law.
And bring back the Fairness Doctrine. It wouldn't kill any media to give up, say, one advertisement in 10 to post an ad of the candidate's choice, rotating through the candidates.
Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.
I've thought for a long time
that it would be good to have several tv and radio channels dedicated solely for candidates' advertising, etc., that people could watch/listen as they chose. And no advertising would be allowed on any other channels.
But news is essentially advertising....
The internet is already self-choice.
dfarrah
That's why we need the Fairness Doctrine brought back,
This all Trump all the time is why he has so many people willing to vote for him, IMO.
Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.
"Hilarious" double standard: When the two parties want to
exclude someone (be it someone like Bernie or a third party), they are "private" and don't need to follow laws that our government needs to follow ( But when the DNC is hacked, "Russia" is hacking our "government."
Yep. The same double standard exists in elections
as well. They're private entities when it comes to making their own rules, but quasi-official government organizations when it comes to paying for and running the elections. That's one reason why closed primaries are undemocratic and disenfranchising.
Indeed - they've effectively
Indeed - they've effectively privatized elections and allow only their privately chosen candidates to run for public office. How is this not unconstitutional and an abuse of every citizen's guaranteed Constitutional rights?
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
One of my state representatives is a friend of mine and a
Republican. I told him the only way he could ever gain my vote would be for him to submit legislation and push for passage of publicly financed elections in our state. Of course he says he agrees but he can't do that. We need some progressive organizations to get together and draft a pledge for public financing like Grover Norquist's no new taxes pledge that was so successful keeping the Republicans in line. The electorate needs to get on the same page and not vote for anyone that does not take and uphold the pledge. Until the money is out and until the majority of people vote FOR someone rather than against the perceived greater evil, nothing will change for the better in this country.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK | "The more I see of the moneyed peoples, the more I understand the guillotine." - G. B. Shaw Bernie/Tulsi 2020
Kiddie table
Well, all the networks bent over backwards to include all 20 or so Republicans - with a JV debate before the varsity debate. What would prevent them from doing the same with a Libertarian-Green debate before all the Repugnant-Demonic debate.
Taming The Presidential Debates - from a book
I know the author of this book on political economy. I have the entire text on line and it is available for download for 99 cents. It was published in 2012 and is the result of a lifetime of a government professor and classics scholar and novelist. He spent almost 6 years on the book to make government statistics real, within the context of politics.
Here is part of the chapter titled "Selling Congress"
I was going to run it as a series on DK/TOP with a couple of chapters per week with the text of the chapters posted.
This is related to the presidential debates. All of the rest is direct from the text
Taming The Presidential Debates
The last remaining bump in the road to mindless elections was the presidential debates. They did not fit the model of campaigns as theater. The debates were a recent thing, held at bay for more than three decades. The age of radio, begun in the 1920s, had created a national audience, yet the debates didn’t happen. No candidate wanted to be the first to debate before the entire public. What if he made a mistake, said the wrong thing, stammered his answers, or appeared indecisive? Could a bad performance cost him the election? Since it was untested water, no one knew the answer. Therefore, no candidate jumped at the chance to make history. It was too risky.
Franklin Roosevelt was as popular as a president could get. It put him way ahead in the polls. And he was no stranger to the radio. Roosevelt used the radio often for his fireside chats. The off-the-cuff soliloquies let him speak his mind to the public, but in a way that gave Roosevelt complete control. A radio debate was different. What if he made a mistake? Roosevelt could lose his lead in the polls. He might even lose the election. He refused to debate.
Eisenhower could have been the first president to debate on television. He turned down the chance. Eisenhower was enormously popular. But he was also an awful public speaker. He flubbed his words and often spoke in incomplete sentences that made no sense. Like Roosevelt, he did not want to throw away his lead in the polls by doing poorly in a debate.
History had to wait until 1960 for the first presidential debate. It was between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. The debate was so popular that the public made it a rite of passage for presidential campaigns. Future candidates who ducked debates were punished at the voting booth.
In 1976, the League of Women Voters sponsored the debates. The League was the ideal choice. Its sole purpose was to promote honest democracy through a discussion of the important issues of the day. With the League in charge, it was difficult for candidates to avoid tough questions on issues that really mattered. But this created a problem. Washington no longer served the people. It served the corporations and the rich. It would not do to have the League on television before a national audience asking questions that exposed the scandal of our stolen democracy. It was urgent that the Democrats and Republicans take the debates away from the League and run the debates themselves.
Three elections later, in 1988, the leaders of the two main parties conspired to hijack the debates. Behind the scenes they created the Commission on Presidential Debates. The name sounds official, like a committee that congress appointed to take care of the public good. It is nothing of the sort. It is a private corporation, funded by corporate sponsors like Xerox, Ford Motors, and the agribusiness giant ADM. And the commission certainly does not have the good of the public in mind when it organizes debates. At the same time, the Democratic and Republican candidates met secretly to make their own rules for the debates. These rules turned the debates into a glorified press conference. There would be no hard questions or no real give-and-take debate.
The League of Women Voters refused to accept these limits. It was clear the candidates wished to avoid substance and spontaneity and to skirt tough questions. They wanted to turn the debates into a fraud. The League announced at a press conference that it “has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”46
When the League backed out, the Commission on Presidential Debates was in the aisles waiting to take over. It has been running the show ever since. Under its rule, in the place of debates, the candidates exchange sound bites. Answers to questions must be crammed into a tight one and a half to two minutes. And the commission keeps third party candidates off the stage, even when polls show the majority of Americans want them included.47 Third-party candidates are too dangerous. They might raise real issues.
Even with all of the controls, candidates still worry they might make a flub in front of millions of voters. The commission protects them by scheduling the debates at a time when people are likely to be watching something else. This is why so many of the debates are shown opposite MLB playoff games.4
“Worse than You Think: The Real Economy Hidden Beneath Washington’s Rigged Statistics, And Where To Go From Here”
by Keith Quincy.
Available amazon.com and barnes and nobel.com for $15. Kindle 99 cents
1988 Poppy Bush v. Mike Dukakis
Both signed a secret agreement about the debates, but that was 28 years ago.
Clearly, it is the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that seek to hoodwink the public, thoroughly enabled by mainstream media. I will not give a dime to any of those three. (Political trivia: Head of the DNC then was Kirk, who later became the "placeholder" Senator for Ted Kennedy's seat.)
The problem is not only that the debates do not include third party candidates. It is that they are carefully staged to hide as much about the candidates from the public as is possible. For example, the taller candidate tends to win more Presidential elections, so the candidates are seen side by side only when they shake hands. That's before we even get to staged questions, limits on subject matter, etc. The League was quite correct to characterize the demands of the parties as hoodwinking the American public. And then, we're surprised that primaries are rigged, with the help of media?
Very instructive and not very long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Debates
(Non governmental? HA! Bipartisan, yes--as most of the worst things in the US have been in recent years; nonpartisan, NO.)
Please note that a few companies withdrew sponsorship of the debates. We should (a) not watch these phony debates and (b) contact the companies that sponsor them and, if they do not withdraw, boycott them.
Yes! You're brilliant!
Yes! You're brilliant! Boycotts are one of the few things which work - and should be applied to all corporations involved in the TPP and other corporate coups as well, organized before we essentially lose the internet under the TPP and other corporate coups, although not sure how we identify the thousands of self-interests involved there.
Edited because I somehow missed a word... and re-edited because it was covered by a different one. Weak coffee just doesn't seem to have much effect, does it?
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.