Anthony Aú✧Green Party🌻
Green Party => A. Democracy - Political Reforms => Platform - Section I. Democracy => A6. Democracy - Reducing Corruption and Good Government => Topic started by: AnthonyAú on Mar 04, 2024, 05:55 AM
Platform - Green Party US I. Democracy A. Political Reforms 6. Reducing Corruption and Good Government- Expand the Freedom of Information Act to apply to Congressional records.
Create a Congressional Records Act to prohibit the destruction of potentially important documents.
Establish an independent records office for each chamber of Congress, with duties similar to the National Archives and Records Administration and executive agency Freedom of Information Act offices, so that individual Congressional member offices are not deciding which documents to preserve; and
- Require Congressional member offices to proactively disclose records of lobbyist and visitor contacts.
To address potential conflicts of interest, Prohibit all individual stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses.
Require that members divest interests in closely held businesses (including family businesses).
Prohibit members and senior aides from owning individual interests in companies, and instead require them to hold only publicly traded index or diversified mutual funds, U.S. treasury bonds, or other similar assets.
- Ensure the public can easily identify financial interests that might present conflicts for Congress members and senior staff.
Require that Congress members file more detailed financial disclosure reports and provide more information about their potential financial conflicts of interest to the House and Senate ethics committees.
Require all members and senior staff disclose any financial interests they hold in any company or industry that is related to or impacted by matters before any committee on which they serve or work.
Require that, prior to any hearing featuring any person representing any corporation, entity, industry group, or other interested party, committee members and committee staff release a statement documenting any interest, financial or otherwise, that is reasonably related to the witnesses.
- Empower the Securities and Exchange Commission to conduct insider trading and other securities investigations of Congress members and staff who are privy to material nonpublic information.
Empower the Internal Revenue Service to conduct yearly audits of member finances, as a strong disincentive against members trying to hide financial interests, while simultaneously giving the public confidence that members are playing by the same financial rules as everyone else.
- Prohibit members of Congress, Governors, state legislators and their staffs from accepting for their own personal benefit any gifts of any amount from lobbyists or the general public.
- Require outside counsel to investigate ethics complaints against members of Congress, and toughen punishments within the congressional ethics processes for corruption, abuse of power and other wrongdoing.
- Expand revolving-door lobbying "cooling off" periods for members of Congress and their top staff to at least two years.
- Strengthen ethics requirements for Supreme Court judges and other federal jurists, including to address financial conflicts of interest and other forms of influence that are damaging to the courts' independence and impartiality.
- Substantially increase the size of the Supreme Court so that filling any single vacancy would have less impact on the ideological balance of the Court, so that the larger size would limit the ideological bias of individual justices, and so that the larger size could better represent the diversity of experience in society and inform the Court's decision-making.
Substantially increase the size of the Supreme Court to enable the Court to expand its capacity to hear more cases.
Replace lifetime appointments with term lengths, so that all appointees to regular terms serve terms of equal length. Establish term lengths so each presidential administration would have appointments to make.
Consider term limits and a mandatory retirement age for justices.
- Promote experimentation with citizens' assemblies to enable the public to interact directly with Congress
- Increase the number of polling places, and increase the pay for poll workers.
- Strengthen "sunshine laws" to provide citizens with all necessary information and access to their political system.
- Ensure that all important federal, state and local government documents are on the Internet, especially texts of bills, searchable databases of voting records, draft committee and conference reports, and court decisions.
- Reinvigorate the independent investigative agencies, such as the General Accounting Office and the inspectors general.
- Enact tough new federal anti-bribery and gratuity laws to stop corporations and the wealthy from purchasing government action, and vigorously enforce of anti-corruption laws by the Justice Department.
- Support the ability of cities to establish elected police commissions with the power to set hire and fire police chiefs, set policies and budgets, and independently investigate and discipline police misconduct, with a budgeted a support staff, including legal support.