More needed election reform. The GOP has to cheat to win. It's despicable and it should be illegal:
With their new power, Democratic leaders want to craft a constitutional way to stop voters from being flooded with robo-calls peddling deceptive information. They are floating the notion that authorizing calls with fraudulent content should be a crime. "These robo-calls, somehow, constitutionally, we are going to have to find some way to stop this," Reid said.TPM Muckraker reports that incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will include legislation dealing with robo-calls and other campaign scams in the first ten bills he sponsors.
Schumer said he and Rep. Rahm Emanuel -- the boss of the House Democratic campaign committee, who is expected to be elected to a leadership spot today -- made a list of what they consider abusive campaign practices. In some cases, the volume of calls that went out to targeted likely Democratic voters was so heavy as to constitute harassment.
In other examples, the calls peddled disinformation -- whether about a candidate or the location of a polling place. Criticizing the robo-call dirty tricks, Schumer was blunt. "It's despicable" and the perps "should go to jail for 10 years."
Schumer said he and Emanuel are looking at legislation applying criminal penalties to certain kinds of campaigning and creation of a separate unit at the Justice Department to prosecute.
When you win, you can write new laws to address and prevent abuses instead of just getting abused again.
