Rigging the Commission on Presidential Debates [CPD] will not be an issue of major party debates. Neither party wants independent voters, the nation’s rapidly growing voting block, to know. To know what?
With media complicity, Dems-Repubs keep off the national stage any discussion of the recently filed federal lawsuit challenging their strangling control over next year’s presidential debates. Fixing, racketeering, exclusionary collusion come to mind.
In the 1980s, Dems-Repubs bullied the esteemed League of Women Voters out of sponsoring the debates. Quickly they established in 1987 the CPD as a tax-sheltering, policing mechanism to exclude legitimate establishment challengers. To justify their nefarious actions, the CPD pretends to use objective qualifying rules. The dominant rule is the 15 percent threshold in the polls; said polls are manipulated every which way by cash flow.
Co-plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit are Our America Initiative, the Libertarian Party, and the Green Party, the latter two being nationally recognized with proven durability. In the 2012 campaigns the CPD made sure voters never had a chance to decide for an informed choice. The federal lawsuit contests the CPD’s machinations on anti-trust principles; the CPD constitutes a trust, a monopoly over free trade of ideas. Financial rewards, tax exemptions and diminished competition follow from this duopoly.
Perhaps independent voters’ frustrations will finally have an airing in court? Why have the Dems-Repubs debates omitted this issue [by design]? We citizens want and deserve media’s more probing, insightful reporting.
Bill McCord,
Haines