The best antidote to this imbalance of income and influence would be to greatly reduce the role of private funding in our elections. Nothing is more empowering to the well-heeled — corporations, unions, lobbyists, political-action committees, trade associations and bundlers — than our political leaders’ need to come to them hat in hand for the money to get elected…

[T]hose in tents across the nation should start going door to door with petitions, visiting legislators and building alliances with good-government groups, all in service to a proposed amendment that might read something like this: “The Congress and the States shall regulate the direct and indirect expenditure of private funds on the electoral process in order to ensure that no group, entity or individual exercises unequal influence on an election by those means.”

It would be an uphill fight, of course, because passage of the amendment would mean convincing incumbents across the country to turn their backs on the system that put them in office. On the other hand, the expenditure limits that became law in 1974 passed by a two-thirds majority of each house of Congress, after President Gerald Ford’s veto.