People worrying about money in politics are overemphasizing the instrumentality of money, rather than the underlying structural incentives that tend toward special interests dominating complex issues.

If money were removed from the equation, the concentrations of power, motivations to influence it, and asymmetries in those motivations will all continue to exist; political influence will just be exercised through other means, and some particular faction or class of people will still be at the sweet spot of having the greatest competence and the greatest motivation to apply those means.

A lot of people are reluctant to acknowledge it, but this is inherent to politics itself, and there is no straightforward way to fix it, other than to limit the reach of political power.

There are no pretenses in political giving (at least at the U.S. federal level), because it is illegal to tie a donation to a particular position, vote, or action by the politician. It’s called a quid pro quo and is the test for whether a donation is a bribe.

In the U.S. the political system is based on people, not positions or policy. Donations to a politician are to the person. It’s not a proxy for buying an outcome.

In practice, of course people are going to support politicians who they like and think agree with them. But under the law, a politician can’t rip you off by taking your money and then voting contrary to your desires.

The general public isn't willing to pay for this, so it's very hard to do this. Especially given that most of this isn't exactly going to generate tons of views.

Let's be honest, in general, the public is very upset about all the injustice they perceive. But the public also lost all interest in the process, some can't even be bothered to vote once every other year....

It's too easy to blame others for your own inaction

However you are proposing that journalists as a homogenous group do some extra work. I think that's a great thing but I don't get why you say the press aren't doing their job when they are at an historical low of compensation and respect.

If sounds like you are outsourcing your rage at the legislature and the press and journalists are the problem?

Sticking to the FTA someone made a first step in version tracking legislative texts but you do not think they've done enough?

Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.

In the present day, mainstream journalists won't be meaningful advocates for democracy and the public interest any time soon. It's time to acknowledge that this idea is wishful thinking. The root cause is changes to the law like the Telecom Act of 1996 which allowed for the consolidation of old media under a few corporations.

For many years these mainstream journalists have been required to support corruption, cronyism, the centralization of power, and the increase of corporate power in order to retain their jobs. The law needs to be changed before they can become a net benefit to society again.

I'm personally not interested in being dependent on the press -- which is just other people pursuing their own interests and assumptions -- to interpret artificially opaque sources, if those sources can just be made accessible instead.

Having a dynamic and pluralistic press is a good thing, and we need more investigative journalism, to discover what isn't visible to the public, but I'm not sure there's a lot of value in the sort of interpretive journalism you're proposing.

The problem is, barely anyone is willing to pay the press for doing this job.

Outrage farming and clickbait make money, honest reporting does not.

Well, it's practically impossible to get a person to do something when their paycheck depends on their not doing it.

This is often especially cynical because [popular thing x] is often something that neither party wants to pass. So a very recent example of this was an act against insider trading by politicians, that was bundled with a voter id law. Neither side wants to clamp down on insider trading from politicians, so the entire act was DOA. It was nothing but bread and circuses.

Git is a tool, or more accurately in this case, an interface. The measure is the attribution of edits.

It's a matter of time.

It's like the people that complain their favoured politician has more scrutiny on them when actually that politician just commits lots of crimes.

2. It will create an incentive structure that will reflect the goals of political parties.

Transparency brings the office into the political sphere. Nothing in the political sphere escapes partisanship. It's pretty clear that no one knew this office existed before I brought it up and folks thought that lawmakers drafted their own bills. The fact that we're even now talking about it in terms of politics is evidence that it will devolve into partisan politics.

I get your instinct - transparency is in general a net good. But the more public an office is, the more it is drawn into partisanship.

Politics is especially prone to engineers disease and this is a great example of it. It assumes a technical solution in the spirit of transparency applies to complex human, social, and political domains where those frameworks do not neatly fit. When someone points out engineers disease, have some introspection before questioning their motives.