how do you verify that the donation would have gone to the political party?
It is probably impossible to become extremely confident about that, but past contributions to a party are a good predictor of future contributions, and I believe that Federal campaigns are required to disclose the names and amounts of any contributions to the Federal Election Commission, which publishes them.
Those published disclosures can be used to qualify a counterparty (a person one is considering making a deal with) and then to verify that the counterparty carried out his end of the deal.
The deal should be that a Republican promises to contribute X dollars less this election cycle than he did last cycle if a Democrat will do the same.
The deal reduces (direct) contributions to campaigns even without the requirement that the Republican and the Democrat agree on a charity to donate 2 * X dollars to. In particular, it reduces (direct) contributions even if the two “sides” of the deal just keep that money.
There are indirect ways to make contributions that do not require disclosure, however, and IIUC these indirect ways are heavily used because they allow individuals to get around the dollar limits on direct contributions. So that consideration brings back the idea that the $X each “side” saves in the deal should go to charity (but I see no need to require that each “side” donate their $X to the same charity, just that the donations can be verified) because it gives some assurance that the $X will not become indirect contributions to a political party, since the total amount an individual is willing to spend on altruism tend to stay relatively constant year over year. But that takes out of the stream of money going to campaigns and parties mostly altruistic money, leaving mostly unaffected the money that expects to profit from the contributions, which might have a bad effect on the political process.
Also, credible arguments have been made that past experience with the dollar-limit laws shows that it is futile to keep money out of politics because the people who make their living from that money have so much influence on the law-making process and because there is so much smart money that wants to contribute to candidates and to parties. Carl’s analysis in the OP of the efficacy of “buying” a vote is evidence for that last point.
It is probably impossible to become extremely confident about that, but past contributions to a party are a good predictor of future contributions, and I believe that Federal campaigns are required to disclose the names and amounts of any contributions to the Federal Election Commission, which publishes them.
Those published disclosures can be used to qualify a counterparty (a person one is considering making a deal with) and then to verify that the counterparty carried out his end of the deal.
The deal should be that a Republican promises to contribute X dollars less this election cycle than he did last cycle if a Democrat will do the same.
The deal reduces (direct) contributions to campaigns even without the requirement that the Republican and the Democrat agree on a charity to donate 2 * X dollars to. In particular, it reduces (direct) contributions even if the two “sides” of the deal just keep that money.
There are indirect ways to make contributions that do not require disclosure, however, and IIUC these indirect ways are heavily used because they allow individuals to get around the dollar limits on direct contributions. So that consideration brings back the idea that the $X each “side” saves in the deal should go to charity (but I see no need to require that each “side” donate their $X to the same charity, just that the donations can be verified) because it gives some assurance that the $X will not become indirect contributions to a political party, since the total amount an individual is willing to spend on altruism tend to stay relatively constant year over year. But that takes out of the stream of money going to campaigns and parties mostly altruistic money, leaving mostly unaffected the money that expects to profit from the contributions, which might have a bad effect on the political process.
Also, credible arguments have been made that past experience with the dollar-limit laws shows that it is futile to keep money out of politics because the people who make their living from that money have so much influence on the law-making process and because there is so much smart money that wants to contribute to candidates and to parties. Carl’s analysis in the OP of the efficacy of “buying” a vote is evidence for that last point.