I announced the formation of the Hawkins 2020 Exploratory Committee today in Washington DC. Greens from seven states were there and I was honored that two them were former Green Party vice-presidential candidates. 2016 VP candidate Ajamu Baraka took time from a busy schedule around the 2-year anniversary of the Black Alliance for Peace. 2012 VP candidate Cheri Honkala drove down 3 hours from Philadelphia after working her graveyard shift at UPS, which I can relate to because I used to do work that shift at UPS in Syracuse. I hope she got a good nap before clocking in again tonight!

Later in the day, I joined the Green Women’s Caucus at their news conference in front of the Supreme Court and at their event at Bus Boys and Poets on K Street where I talked about election reform. I argued that the matching funds system of partial public campaign finance proposed in HR 1 is a reform that doesn’t reform. It just puts some public money on top of the same old dominating pile of big private money. We need the Clean Money model of full public campaign financing: equal campaign grants with mandatory debates and equal broadcast and cable time for all candidates who opt in.

But public campaign finance will still be overwhelmed by SuperPAC independent expenditures, Dark Money spent by nonprofits using undisclosed donors’ money, and super-rich people spending unlimited funds on their own campaigns. In order to establish that we, the people, through our elected representatives, can fully regulate election finances, we need to enact HJR 48, the We The People Amendment.  HJR 48 will end corporate personhood by establishing that only natural persons have constitutional rights. It will end the judicial doctrine that money is speech in elections.

I also made the case that proportional representation in legislative bodies would be a game changer for fair elections and full representation of the people. If each party had representation in the legislative bodies of those country in proportion to their votes, the Green Party would have representation in just about every city and town council, every state legislature, and Congress—and America would be very different for the better.