Posted on 04/16/2011 4:35:18 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
One problem with third parties is that secretaries of state from both sides of the aisle find reasons to disqualify them from the ballot.
We need a Voters' Bill of Rights. The first item of such a bill HAS TO BE runoff elections or instant runoff elections for all public offices. Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.
There should also be a None-Of-Above choice on all ballots for public office and if that choice ever wins, then the other candidates should be barred for life from holding any public office and the parties sponsoring them should be barred for at least ten years from sponsoring candidates for that particular office. The penalty for running dead wood for public offices should be severe.
Another item on such a voters' bill of rights should be something which would eliminate voting fraud for all time and if that means getting rid of the secret ballot or at least limiting it somehow or other, so be it, we're paying too high a price for it. Somehow or other it has to be possible to check up on votes when there are questions or evidence of fraud.
There should be a provision that when a president is impeached and removed, his VP goes out the door with him and the office is either vacant until the next election or an emergency election is held to fill the office for the remainder of the current term. Granted removing a president should be difficult but it should not be impossible and if we couldn't remove Slick, we'd not have been able to remove Hitler or Nero either.
What happened in 98/99 was that Trent Lott simply refused to hand the presidency over to Algor with a year to go on Slick's second term, for obvious reasons. The situation should not be possible.
A person should need to be a US citizen for 18 years before voting in a US election. It should not be possible for a rogue political party to rule our land by simply importing large voting blocks for itself.
There should also be some mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices. Certainly a candidate for president or vice president, or for US Senator or member of the House of Representatives should need to obtain the same basic and simple secret level security clearance which anybody would need to be a guard at the gate of any military base in our land. That isn't asking for much but it would have spared us from the last two democrat presidents.
There are a few other things you'd want but that's the main gist of it. There is also a question as to the extent the people should be voting on issues directly since we now have the technology to allow that while the founding fathers did not. You could get some of these evil social issues settled once and for all and out of politics, and you could limit the scope for corruption and bribery by letting the people themselves settle at least some kinds of issues.
We need to quite crying and get out and vote in the primaries.
Busy bodies the whole lot of them! ; )
Replacement party would be more desirable if it were possible.
Third party? No.
But a new second party? Not if the Republicans clean up their act. But they have less than one year to do so, and they are showing few signs of being willing to do so.
What will happen to those 59 decent Republicans? And where will we find the money for this new party?
Well, when the Whigs committed suicide 150 years ago, most of the best of them went over to the Republicans. And most of the donors followed. What else were they going to do? Stay with a dead party? Go down with the ship?
Yes, Sarah said that she was trying to help the Republicans by supporting the Conservative in the NY 23 race against Dede Scozzafava. That was the preferred solution. But did the Republicans learn their lesson in that district and come around in the next election? No.
Sarah will certainly stick with the Republicans if they allow her to. She was elected as a Republican governor of Alaska, after shoveling out the Corrupt Bastards Club in her own party.
She’ll do the same thing again, IF the Republicans wake up and start making sense. But that’s rather doubtful, isn’t it? And if they DON’T make sense, then we need to get behind a leader who is strong enough to lead a new party into power. Not a spoiler, but a builder. Sarah is the only one around capable of doing that. Otherwise, our country is going to die at the hands of these Progressives and RINOs, eagerly dividing the spoils as the economy is destroyed.
Yeah, but I am terminally PO’s at the RINOs still running things and DESPERATLY want to kick their asses.
I DO NOT want to wait for primary time.
I’d like to see bipartisan debates during the primaries. I don’t care if it takes a week and includes 30 candidates, our whole system of primary single party debates doesn’t tell us much.
Bring in ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and CNN and let them take turns asking questions. Sure the deck will be stacked but our candidates will have to deal with the stacked deck anyway. If they can’t face the firing line they can stay home.
Doesn’t New York have a mechanism where a candidate can run on the ballot under two different parties and have the votes combined in the final tally?
If so, this would be the ideal way to have a third pary, forcing candidates to cater to both their Republican Party and the Conservative/Tea Party or risk losing the election. The goal would be to force the Republicans to choose their canditates carefully to avoid alienating the third party. This could work rather well if the third party has a large base of registered voters.
The problem with third parties is that by the time they are viable others will want a new fourth party to take their place since they will have compromised what they stared out believing and it too will be watered down.
It’s nice to think that is a way to beat both the Dem. and Rep. branches of THE BIG GOVERNMENT PARTY.
But the truth is that the game is rigged and all a conservative (or non-RINO, less liberal) third party candidacy does is give the Democrats an easy win.
Ross Perot’s third party campaign put Bill Clinton in the White House with less than fifty percent of the vote in both 1992 and 1996.
1992: Clinton 43.0% - H.W. Bush 37.5% - Ross Perot 18.9%
1996: Clinton 49.2% - Bob Dole 40.7% - Ross Perot - 8.4%
I don't believe at that time it took the tremendous amount of cash, candidates or “on the ground forces” as it would today (as the article stated.)
Case in point..the Libertarian Party is about the closest thing we have to a viable 3rd party. And certainly intending no offense to anyone, but very often they run as Republicans in order to get on the ticket.
The republican party is savable, imho. But it won't happen overnight.
Did he say where the line starts for the grape drink.
“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube . . .
When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.” -A. Rand
The so-called GOP has two disparate factions whose actions and goals are, increasingly, fundamentally contradictory. The RINO wing of the party wants to "go along to get along" with the Democrats. The conservative wing seeks to stop the Democrats. If the conservative wing succeeds (as it must for the country to survive), it will destroy the cozy relationships the go-along-to-get-along wing has been forming for many years; without those relationships, GATGA politicians will have nothing, and they know it.
Conservatives need to be willing to call out GATGA politicians for what they are. It is pointless to try to work with them or negotiate with them. For the GATGA politicians to really help conservatives would be political suicide. It's possible that a GATGA politician could ditch all his old political relationships and rebuild himself as a conservative, but unless a GATGA politician is willing to go that far, their goals will necessarily be antithetical to the well-being of this country.
Thanks SeekAndFind!
Alrighty then...a little deeper response that I expected, but I surely respect it and it is duly noted.
Third party issues are always adopted by another party. They never win.
Before you decide that you really want a third political party then have a look at the dillema Australia is having at the moment.juLIAR Gillard in now having to pander to the Greens-Going back to pre-election times she announced publicy those infamous words “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead” Then come the election the result was so close and with her desparate to win she did an underhanded and dirty deal with the Greens party to win their support and the Prime Ministership.
Now the tome has come for her to keep her word with the greens or face another election she is now going to force
through a carbon tax that only the greens want thus hand power to the greens to get this abhorrent tax through.
Every citizen in Australia will now have to pay an extra $280 on top of their normal tax while our major industries including steel manufacturing and car assembly plants closing down and moving overseas with all their employees losing their jobs.The greens will close down our coal fired
power station and cause rolling blackouts everywhere.
So decide wisely before you really want a third party.
I would hate to so the U.S.A. go down this path.
We have a different politic system here but if it happened there you would probably hang the President for treason.
There are times when a proper position can in fact be between two extremes. On the other hand, if one faction wants to build a $500,000 facility and another that doesn't, there's a big difference between deciding to split the difference by building a $250,000 facility (which may be insufficient to do anything useful), versus doing some analysis to discover how much of a facility is really needed, discovering that a $250,000 facility will suffice for 20 years and will be expandable if/when the need arises, and deciding on that basis to build a $250,000 facility.
A maxim comes to mind: If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right; if something isn't worth doing right, it isn't worth doing.
Compromise based upon cost-benefit analysis is fine; compromise based upon arbitrary split-the-difference is silly and wasteful. Unfortunately, today's politics seem to be dominated by the latter.
Everything can be boiled down to that. One current party is awful, but the other one is evil. I say do what Ronald Reagan did: improve on the one that is merely awful. This option is nauseating perhaps, but it's our only choice. And besides, we got off to a pretty good start in 2010.
Oh BS! Mr Edmund Wright. Look at post #2. We need independent voices to stand on that stage, in that debate, to expose the Washington DC cabal. Donald Trump right now essentially IS a third party. Not that I would ever vote for him as President if there are conservative alternatives, but it his own resources that allow him to expose the a**hole who WE elected to office, and reveal our descent into Leftist subjugation, i.e. Obamacare, or Goldman Sachs loans, or an enabled invasion from the South.
Yes Yes, the Democrats might win a Presidency, or a congressional majority, but they have already done that. And we are screwed, witness ObamaCare, which will NEVER be repealed. The more dissident and vociferous the voices in central government the better, it allows us more circumspect people to get on with our own lives and the centralized government dismantled, or at least disabled.
If YOU are an agent and apologist for the Republican Party then tell them to articulate, concur, and enact, what conservatism is - it is not difficult - it is assuming individual responsibility and moral discipline for one's own decisions. Until then I will campaign for an outspoken voice who clarifies what individual freedom, human dignity, self honesty, and responsibility, are, once the foundation of America; whether or not that voice is a Democrat, a Greenie, a Republican, a Tory, a Christian Coalition, or whatever deceitful verbiage you or the pusillanimous sycophants In Washington DC conjure to call it. The "Republican Party" is a joke, certainly not the principled individuals, Rubio, DeMint, West, etc, whom you mention, but they can espouse their principles under any umbrella. Isn't that what the "Independent" thing is about?
Furthermore no matter how many political parties exist, if there IS a common value of Conservatism, the individual responsibility we have identified above, then those concurrent agents of those parties can agree to act accordingly.
Do you see it now?
It is not a matter of "political party" it is a matter of values. And no labeling or political obsequiousness can encapsulate that.
Johnny Suntrade
The great privilege of humanity is to realize the responsibility of one's own actions. - JS
Whoever's agenda is undertaken by the party in power, wins.
My bad!
TOME=time(line 8)
I’ve never liked a politition who ‘stands firmly on the fence.’
The real goal should be to take over an existing party. That way you inherit a lot of "force of habit" voters.
Keep in mind that the entire 1920 platform of the Socialist Party was enacted by the 1950s. It was done by taking over the Democrats. Reversing it will mean taking over one of the major parties. Most likely the Republican Party.
Those would be a great start on turning the ship of state back toward the Constitution and Conservatism.
The GOP is our party, but we have to take it back from the infiltrating, elitist, globalist, RINO weasels who are running it now.
Tell that to Bush 41.
We got 8 years of Clinton.
bump for later
This article is not helpful.
Interesting - recall petitions are your best bet, I guess.
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