I was fortunate to see Lawrence Lessig speak at NN 08' and NN 09'
Lawrence Lessig Says "If We Want to Change, We Have to Change Congress" democracynow.org
AMY GOODMAN:We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Professor Lessig. How do you change Congress?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, the most important thing to do is to change the economy of influence that Congress lives inside. Right now Congress—members of Congress spend an extraordinary amount of their time worrying not so much about what their constituents want, but about how they can make sure that they raise the money they need either to get back into power themselves or to help their party get back into power. Some estimate it’s between 30 and 70 percent for members to spend raising money to get back to Congress.
So, that can’t help but create a kind of dependency, which conflicts with the dependency our framers intended them to have, meaning a dependency on the people. They have a dependency on the fundraisers. So that’s the Fundraising Congress that I think we have got to change, break, if we are going to ever see any reform, either from the right or from the left.
Its impossible to imagine that the framers of our Constitution would have welcomed the corrosive power the economy of influence holds over the congress, much less enhancing the power of the economy of influence as the Roberts Supreme Court has just done. This has compromised the Congress' ability to deal with pressing national issues effectively, as Congress has so clearly demonstrated in recent months.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Professor Lessig, in your article, you express deep disappointment in the failure during the first year of the Obama administration to bring real change to Washington or even to address this issue of what you call the "Fundraising Congress." You say at one point "there is nothing in the current framework of the White House’s plans that is anything more than the strategy of a kinder and gentler, [albeit] certainly more articulate, George W. Bush: buying reform at whatever price the Fundraising Congress demands." Could you expound on that and the disappointment you felt about President Obama, whom you knew and supported throughout the years?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Right. So, when Obama was running for president, time after time he identified the problem with the way Washington works as the reason he was running for president, to take on that problem of changing that system. As he said, if we don’t take up the fight, we’re never going to get reform that will last and change the kind of problems we’ve been facing generation after generation.
Now, what does that reform? That means changing the way Congress thinks about these problems by changing the economy of influence within which they live. So, that would be the support, for example, of a bill which he co-sponsored when he was senator, the Fair Elections Now Act, which would create small dollar contributions, a voluntary opt-in system for small dollar contributions, where no one, after that bill would be passed, could imagine that the reason Congress was doing what they were doing was because of the money. It might be they’re too stupid, or they’re too liberal, or they’re too conservative, but not because of the money. And that’s the change that’s necessary before people will once again have any faith or trust in this institution.
Its not enough to win the money game in Washington, we need to change how the game is played that now allows massive amounts of money to override the public's interest. The bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act could become the essential first step toward restoring our Democracy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But I guess a key assumption of your analysis is that the Congress is broken compared to a time when it was fixed, or that it’s somehow more corrupt now than it was in the past, when some would argue that this has been historically a problem in the United States, of those with money being able to buy influence in the halls of Congress and in Washington.
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah, it’s counterintuitive, because, on the one hand, I think the amount of overt bribery, violations of criminal law by members of Congress, is at the lowest it’s ever been in the history of the United States Congress. I mean, the nineteenth century was a cesspool of that grotesque kind of corruption. And the twentieth century and twenty-first century are obviously much better in that sense.
But the kind of corruption that we’ve got now is not the hidden corruption of people taking brown paper bags of cash; it’s a kind of corruption in the open. It’s openly encouraging people whose interests you are regulating to contribute in a way to effect that regulation. So it’s—nobody hides. Max Baucus doesn’t hide the fact that he receives more than $4 million in money from the interests whom he controls as the most powerful person in the Senate over healthcare. He is open about it. And by encouraging this kind of dynamic, this kind of economy, we make it actually much harder for ordinary people to believe that they have some role to play here.
And in some sense, even if, you know, the souls of members are not more corrupt, even if they’re, as I believe they are, more honest, have a higher level of integrity, this more open kind of corruption is causing problems that are much more dramatic than the problems that would have been caused by the old sort of bad corruption. Right? So if a guy gets $50,000 in a brown paper bag, that’s one thing. But when we have the kind of corruption in the financial services industry, for example, that led to total deregulation of these new instruments and then blew up the economy as that house of cards began to collapse, the consequences of that corruption are much greater than anything we’ve seen in the past.
So I’m not out here to call individuals evil or to call individuals unethical. I think we’ve got to recognize that there’s a difference between the good souls that might be in Congress and the corruption that might influence the whole institution. And it’s that institution that is my focus.
The Congress enacted a virtual wish list from the financial services industry, that enabled the frenzied speculation that resulted in financial chaos that threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin, taking the whole world's economy along for the ride. When the economy of influence spawned a catastrophe for the larger economy, it has become a threat to the nation as a whole. A threat to our nation's very survival.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Professor Lessig, you’ve called for the way to effect real reform would be by holding a constitutional convention, by getting the various states to begin pressing for a constitutional convention. But given the enormous power that you say that corporate America already has in American society, aren’t you worried perhaps that such a convention, if it were able to succeed, might end up eliminating the Bill of Rights or taking the convention—the Constitution backwards, instead of forward?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, you have to remember that the convention that the framers imagined in Article 5 of the Constitution only has the power to propose amendments. And any amendment that gets proposed still has to be ratified by three-fourths of the states—so that’s thirty-eight states—meaning any twelve states can block any proposed amendment. Now, there are twelve solid red states, and there are twelve solid blue states. So I don’t think either side has an opportunity to, in some sense, take over the other.
But I think that the critical point about a convention is that it is the only method for constitutional change that Washington itself can’t direct and control. And there’s an enormous amount of energy right now happening in Congress trying to—people talking about entering an amendment through the congressional process. And my view is that that’s both a waste of time, because there’s no sixty-seven votes in the United States Senate to support, for example, an amendment to overturn Citizens United, and also it’s the wrong context for that kind of reform. What Congress needs to be doing right now is passing the citizen-funded election bill, the Larson-Jones bill, to make it so that people can once again believe in how Congress does its work. And we need to begin the long process of constitutional reform through this convention process.
Also, the politics of this are very different. People can have an idea of what’s broken and how to fix it. So some people think we’re going to have to overturn Citizens United. Other people, like I, think that the important thing is to make sure Congress has the power to create its own independence from private interests and dependence upon the people. Some people think the President needs a line-item veto. These are hard questions. They’re not going to be resolved through a tweet or through some online internet poll. What has to happen is there has to be a long conversation across the political spectrum that either first produces the call for a conviction and then, second, in the convention itself.
Now, obviously it’s a long shot, but the one thing we know from history is the only time the United States Congress has ever voluntarily amended the Constitution to reduce its power or make it more directly responsive to the people was in the context of the Seventeenth Amendment, which was inspired largely because a convention movement, that was going to force the same amendment into the states, had grown and become substantial enough that people thought it was a likelihood to happen. So I’m eager for the pressure of a convention, either directly or indirectly, to force the reform that I think that we need to get this democracy back to being a democracy.
NOTE: Democracy Now generously allows lengthy excerpts for non-commercial users that identify democracynow.org as the source.
We need the The Fair Elections Now Act for the near term, for the long term the best way to repair our battered democracy would be to change the Constitution to insure the Congress' independence from the economy of influence. That promises to be a daunting task, but the alternative is to watch our government become less and less able to respond effectively to the demands of the new millennium.
Here are some excerpts from Lawrence Lessig's eloquent piece in the Nation:
How to Get Our Democracy Back
Instead, we are now seeing the consequences of a decision made at the most vulnerable point of Obama's campaign--just when it seemed that he might really have beaten the party's presumed nominee. For at that moment, Obama handed the architecture of his new administration over to a team that thought what America needed most was another Bill Clinton. A team chosen by the brother of one of DC's most powerful lobbyists, and a White House headed by the quintessential DC politician. A team that could envision nothing more than the ordinary politics of Washington--the kind of politics Obama had called "small." A team whose imagination--politically--is tiny.
Obama's retreat from essential reforms for our democracy, made the other reforms he is trying to move forward vulnerable to the economy of influence's power to derail them, or transform them into industry oriented creations that don't reduce the flow of profits into corporate coffers.
As fundraising becomes the focus of Congress--as the parties force members to raise money for other members, as they reward the best fundraisers with lucrative committee assignments and leadership positions--the focus of Congressional "work" shifts. Like addicts constantly on the lookout for their next fix, members grow impatient with anything that doesn't promise the kick of a campaign contribution. The first job is meeting the fundraising target. Everything else seems cheap. Talk about policy becomes, as one Silicon Valley executive described it to me, "transactional." The perception, at least among industry staffers dealing with the Hill, is that one makes policy progress only if one can promise fundraising progress as well.
The Parties are even organized to favor the most prolific fund raisers. While some members of congress are quite proficient at fundraising, I can't imagine that many members relish devoting so much of their time to asking for money. They have better things to do.
Here's some more on the Fair Elections Now Act:
The Fair Elections Now Act
The Fair Elections Now Act would create a voluntary program where congressional candidates would qualify for a grant large enough to run a competitive campaign. Candidates would qualify for the grant by demonstrating a broad base of community support by collecting a set number small dollar donations. In return for the grant, participating candidates would agree to strict campaign spending limits and forgo all private fundraising. Candidates would also receive vouchers for purchasing broadcast airtime and receive a 20 percent discount below the lowest unit cost on all advertising purchased.
The Fair Elections Now Act is modeled on successful programs in several states, including Connecticut and North Carolina, the home states of both of the sponsors of the bill introduced today. In Connecticut, 84 percent of state legislative candidates have opted into their program in this its inaugural year. In North Carolina, for the first time, a pilot full public financing of elections program for three of the state's Council of State positions is being implemented. North Carolina's Council of State program is based on their successful parallel program that provides candidates for Supreme Court and Court of Appeals an opportunity to run for the bench free from raising private contributions.
Call your members of congress and urge them to support the Fair Elections Now Act.
Relinquishing our government to corporate interests is NOT an option.
Watch Lawrence Lessig appearance on Bill Moyers Journal last night: Lessig on Moyers