Fix the process, get better politics.
I have spent my career walking into systems that are producing bad outcomes and asking a boring set of questions: what does this thing actually reward, what does it punish, and what constraints is everyone pretending are laws of nature? I finally pointed that at American politics. What came out is four rules — no factions, no flags, just mechanism.
The best rule is the simplest one a special interest can't quietly rewrite.
Every proposal below gets the same treatment: what is the system, what does it incentivize, what constraints are real. Then a rule — one sentence, one number where possible, written so an ordinary person can hold it in their head. That last part is not a stylistic preference. Ambiguity is where the devil lives; every clause of nuance is a handhold for someone with a lobbyist and a decade of patience.
I would rather ship a rule that is 80 percent right and impossible to erode than one that is perfect on paper and full of doors. If a rule collapses the moment money shows up, it was never a rule. It was a wish.
Rule · then the analysisThis is a problem I have been trying to apply a process-oriented approach to for a long time. I am putting this page in the public square not because I have the final answer, but because I want to start a conversation worth having.
My hope is that if enough of us — across the spectrum, across different groups of Americans — join in, we might arrive at something we can actually explain, market, and try to enact. Each of these four rules is powerful on its own. Together, I think they work better than the sum of their parts.
— Charlie Harrison
§ 1 — One class of spender. One federal ceiling. One scope.
- Contributions, in-kind benefits, and independent expenditures all count as the same thing for federal elections.
- The ceiling is 2,000 hours × the federal minimum wage × 10 — currently about $145,000 per year, across all federal races combined.
- A candidate's own federal campaign spending counts against the same ceiling.
The system.
Money in American politics is not one problem, it is a plumbing diagram. Corporations, unions, PACs, super PACs, 501(c)(4)s and self-funding candidates each enter the system through a different pipe, and every pipe was carved out by someone who benefited from carving it. Citizens United did not create the appetite; it removed the last meaningful valve. The biggest remaining valve is the fiction that money spent 'independently' of a campaign is different from money given to it. It is not different in effect, so it cannot be different in law.
The incentives.
Under the current design, a member of the House spends a genuinely absurd share of their working life dialing for dollars. That is not a character flaw, it is exactly what the system rewards. Whoever can deliver a large check in one phone call is worth more of an officeholder's time than a thousand constituents, so that is who gets the time. Change what a dollar can buy and you change what a calendar looks like. The same ceiling applying to a candidate's own wallet means the bar to enter office does not automatically favor people who already have the largest checkbooks or the most expensive friends.
The constraints.
The rule is deliberately written so that the hard part is the politics, not the arithmetic: one class of spender (a living person), one number, one period (a calendar year), one scope. That scope means we treat contributions, in-kind support like aircraft or facilities, independent expenditures, and a candidate's own money as the same kind of thing for the same purpose: they all buy influence in an election. Before Citizens United, the law recognized more of this continuum than it does now. The goal is to return to that spirit — not to regulate speech, but to keep elections from becoming contests of private wealth.
Where I'm still wrong.
The ten-times multiple is the number I am least attached to. It is a starting stake in the ground: it says an unusually wealthy citizen may speak ten times as loudly as a citizen working full-time for the legal minimum, and no louder. If you think the right multiple is five, or twenty, I would like to hear the reasoning — but the ratio has to be small enough that a person can hold it in their head.
§ 2 — Districts a clerk can check with a ruler.
- Equal population: each congressional district contains substantially the same number of people.
- The ruler test: a straight line may pass through the district once, not leave and re-enter.
- The 3-to-1 test: no district may be more than three times as long as it is wide.
The system.
Gerrymandering is usually attacked on intent, which is exactly the wrong surface. Intent is invisible, arguable, and litigated for a decade. Shape is visible on day one. The maps that offend people are the ones that look wrong, and they look wrong because a mapmaker had to reach across a metro area to grab a neighborhood.
The incentives.
When a legislator picks their voters, the general election stops mattering and the primary becomes the whole contest. That rewards the candidate who is most unyielding rather than the one who is most representative, in both parties, structurally. A district that has to be a compact place is a district that has to contain people who disagree with each other.
The constraints.
Both tests are geometry, not policy, which is the entire point. The convexity test (a ruler crosses the boundary exactly twice) kills the tendrils and the barbells. The skinniness test (no dimension greater than three times the perpendicular one) kills the snakes along a highway. A clerk can check them. A judge can verify them. A lobbyist cannot argue them into ambiguity.
Where I'm still wrong.
Geography is stubborn — coastlines, rivers, mountain ranges and state borders will sometimes make a perfect score impossible. I would rather write a narrow, explicit exception for natural boundaries than soften the rule into a vibe. Where exactly that exception starts is a real open question, and it is the one place a special interest will try to live.
§ 3 — Hard term limits for federal office.
- House: four two-year terms.
- Senate: two six-year terms.
- President: two four-year terms.
The system.
A two-year House term means a member is running for reelection roughly from the day they are sworn in. The short cycle is often defended as accountability, but in practice it is what makes the fundraising treadmill inescapable — there is never a stretch of time long enough to do unglamorous work. Four two-year terms keeps the frequent accountability while removing the incentive to spend a career holding the seat.
The incentives.
Seniority is the currency of both chambers, and seniority rewards survival rather than judgment. When the ceiling is known and close, the value of a career shifts away from holding the seat and toward what you actually do with it. Eight years is long enough to learn the institution and short enough that the institution does not become the point.
The constraints.
This only works alongside the money rule. Term limits on their own hand power to the people who never leave — the staff, the committee veterans, and above all the lobbyists, who become the only ones who remember how anything works. Limit the tenure without closing the door and you have simply promoted the door.
Where I'm still wrong.
Four terms is the number I am least attached to. I landed there because it gives a member eight years — two more than a single Senate term, two fewer than a Senate career — and keeps the House close to the voters. I am open to being talked out of the number; I am not open to keeping the treadmill.
§ 4 — Public service doesn't come with a private windfall.
- No lobbying for any private interest, ever.
- No drawing income from any business where federal contracts exceed 5% of revenue.
- The ban applies to elected officials and senior federal appointees.
The system.
The revolving door is the quietest of the four problems and probably the most consequential. Nobody has to be bribed. A procurement officer, a committee staffer, or a member on the armed services committee simply knows that a particular set of firms is where careers go next, and behaves accordingly for twenty years before ever taking the job. The influence is priced into the résumé.
The incentives.
This is sharpest in the military-industrial complex, where the buyer, the seller, and the regulator draw from the same small pool of people. A cooling-off period of one or two years does essentially nothing against a career that spans decades — it delays the payday, it does not remove the expectation of one. If the future job is the real compensation, the rule has to reach the future job.
The constraints.
The five-percent revenue threshold is the mechanism that keeps this from becoming an unemployment sentence: it targets the firms whose business is the government, not every employer in the country. And it is deliberately harsher than anything an officeholder would write for themselves, which is a feature — the people who most dislike this rule are the ones it is about.
Where I'm still wrong.
I am choosing a lifetime ban because a cooling-off period of one or two years only delays the payday; the expectation of the eventual job is itself the compensation. The five-percent revenue line will invite creative corporate structuring the day it passes. I would like help pressure-testing it. Where would you route around this rule if you were trying to?
Four premises that sit underneath the four rules.
Participation should be the default, not a reward. Every rule on this site assumes the same thing: the people governed by a decision are the people who get to weigh in on it. That sounds obvious right up until you notice how many parts of the current system quietly decide, in advance, who counts.
Read & discuss →People tend to do what a system rewards them to do. That is a design fact, not a character judgment, and it is the single most useful lens I know for looking at institutions that are producing outcomes nobody claims to want.
Read & discuss →A rule that cannot be seen cannot be enforced. The same people who draft the exceptions also draft the footnotes that hide them, and a violation nobody can detect is not really a violation — it is an option.
Read & discuss →We are willing to be 80 percent right if it means being 100 percent understandable. That is a genuine trade, and I want to be honest that it is one — every rule here leaves some real-world case handled imperfectly.
Read & discuss →The best argument is one that survives a reply.
Every rule and every guiding philosophy has its own discussion thread. If a line here is wrong, incomplete, or unfair, say so. The goal is not to collect agreement — it is to make the ideas better than they were yesterday.
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