\u201cEvery other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s BS,\u201d a constituent told Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) during a town hall Friday. \u201cI don\u2019t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix\u201d it, the Wisconsinite declared as the crowd roared with applause.<\/p>\n
Ryan, however, was less than sympathetic to their views. He insisted instead that money will always follow power, so because Washington is where policy is made, there is little we can do to mitigate the influence of money in politics. Worse, Ryan even claimed that the rush of corporate and billionaire donations authorized by the Republican justices in Citizens United justifies enacting his draconian budget.<\/p>\n
CONSTITUENT: You have all these different things and I look up there and I say none of them will ever work because of one single item we have in our country today, and I don\u2019t think you or any of the rest of the politicians want to fix. It\u2019s called \u201ccampaign financing,\u201d which makes special interests. [Crowd applauds.] This country is bought, it\u2019s paid for, it\u2019s gift-wrapped. Supreme Court didn\u2019t help us one bit when they made corporations humans, now they can dump all this money in. When you dump $16 million into your campaign fund, I own you. You can look me in the eye and say, \u201coh no, that\u2019s not going to me anything to me.\u201d That\u2019s BS. This is what\u2019s wrong with our country today. We need to get rid of it. Every other country in the world calls it bribery. We call it campaign financing.<\/p>\n
RYAN: The point I would make is so long as so much money is going to be handled and run through government, through Washington, there will always be an attempt to influence it. So to me the best antidote is not give all of our money and our power to Washington, keep it for ourselves and our communities so there\u2019s less influence-peddling there in the first place. […] Even under the so-called new clean law that Russ Feingold wrote, even with the Supreme Court ruling that affected parts of that law. So let\u2019s try and have more transparency so you see where the money\u2019s going, let\u2019s not destroy the political parties which are more [inaudible] to elected officials. Right now you have all these groups that pop up and then they go down come the election cycle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n