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The Shaheen campaign seems to me to be following an interesting and unusual approach. It is not "pushing red meat" to any faction of New Hampshire voters.
Instead, her policy proposals are virtually "apartisan": ideas that are not Democratic or Republican, nor an awkward attempt to steer between left and right - but rather pragmatic, new approaches to government that leave ideologues scratching their heads wondering how to pigeonhole them. The easy income tax filing option was one example - have the IRS send you a form saying "Based on what we already know from last year's return, your wages, etc. we think this is your bill/refund." Do a quick check, sign, and you're done.
Here's another proposal that may fit that mold. Propose putting legislation under revision control.
Every so often we have a mini-scandal where the Congress votes something into law and nobody knows where one of the provisions came from (or at least, nobody admits it). Somewhere - often in conference committee - some staffer included language that hadn't been in earlier version of the bill, and nobody noticed the change. That happened recently with a provision that allowed some of the the recess appointments in the Justice Department to stay on without confirmation. More recently the Farm Bill that the President got was different than the one that passed Congress.
(Some people say "It's outrageous that everyone in Congress does not read every line of every version of every bill!" That was probably practical in oh, 1807.)
I can (barely) understand how these things could have happened in 1965. But I work with computers, and for the past 30-40 years there have been Revision Control Systems (originally Source Code Control Systems) that ensure that every change to a program/document is given a timestamp and authorized username. If you work on documents with colleagues, you may have used the "Track Changes" capabilities of Microsoft Word for the past decade.
What if the text of every piece of legislation were under revision control? When a legislative aide or committee staffer wanted to insert, modify or delete a provision, they would need to "check out" the official version, make the change, and resubmit it - with definitive electronic fingerprints. If we later want to find out where that $460 million bridge came from - the audit trail is there.
This has been a minor hobby horse of mine for a while. The technology to do this is well-proven - almost ancient today, in computer terms. The big arguments for it are Accountability and Transparency.
Those are also the big arguments against it...
Given the Shaheen campaign's sort of apartisan, wonky focus - and I mean that in a good way! - this seems like a natural cause.
