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Well this is an excellent question and I too have been very, very concerned about
the impact of the Citizens United case. I personally think that it was a
flawed decision
and unfortunately has injected
way too much control of
and influence of corporations into the electoral process.
And because of that, our caucus,
even though that was a federal decision, that was a federal matter in that
respect,
our caucus has been very much concerned about its impact on a state level so
we've decided that one of the things that we can try to do
to make sure that citizens know
who is trying to influence a decision,
or influence an election, I should say, is to promote transparency
in the election process as being one of our caucus priorities.
For example in 2010
we rolled out what we called our "Open Gov" legislative package to
improve public access to state government information
and as part of that
we felt like
it would be important for corporations that receive state
tax incentives for creating jobs
that they actually be held up to that obligation
to account for the jobs that they have created.
If they don't materialize, if the corporations don't hold up their end of
the promise then it's our belief that we should try to recapture those benefits
that have been given
to the corporation.
Another initiative which we
brought forth, I think before any other caucus, was to require the Indiana
Economic Development Corporation to publish these performance data
so that people could actually see the
number of jobs purportedly created by these jobs that have received benefits from the
state.
We've also
as far as the election process goes
again focused in on what we think is, how can the donations
that are made by corporations, and really all persons, how can there
be as much information available to the public in that regards?
We had a Senate Resolution that would have commissioned a two year
study of how other states control campaign finances to limit the influence
of big money and influencing the outcome of elections.
And finally,
we've also
in terms of hopefully instilling fairness and competition into
the process
we have longed for a long time as a caucus to champion the idea that
instead of there being a redistricting process controlled by the
legislature itself, which leads to the these
gerrymandered type of districts, that instead we create an independent
redistricting commission,
which hopefully can take so much of the political
influence in the redistricting process
out of that process.
So and
ultimately we feel that transparency is about your involvement in state government so
we of course as always encourage you to actively communicate
with your elected officials and keep current on the issues that impact
your community.