Yesterday, we reviewed Lawrence Lessig's diagnosis that Congress needed fundamental change because the influence of money has corroded our ability to trust the institution to get the "2+2=4" basic policy decisions right. (His NN08 keynote is online here and here.)
Today, let's talk about solutions, and the Change Congress movement he and Joe Trippi founded is organized around four principles:
- No money from lobbyists or PACs
- Vote to end earmarks
- Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
- Support publicly-financed campaigns
Nos. 1 and 4 deal with the supply of money in politics; No. 2 works on the demand side. (Put most simply, if you want to reduce aggregated wealth's influence on politics, reduce what it can buy from politics.) And No. 3 helps provide us with the information to know if 1, 2 and 4 are working.
How is it implemented? Lessig writes, collecting his thoughts from the live presentation:
This movement begins small. It collects Members, candidates and citizens who pledge themselves to a platform of reform. (The first Member to take the pledge was Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee. A gaggle of challengers in the current cycle have taken the pledge to signal how they would be different from the incumbent.) Using wiki-like tools, volunteers will then tag every representative, to map where they stand on core issues of reform. And finally, an Emily’s list like tool will direct money to candidates who support reform, building upon the insight that Madison thought he had perfected — creating the incentive for Members to act to support the good.
Four steps to break the dependence lawmakers have on their funders. Four steps, using tools we already employ in our netroots activism, to elevate Congress from it's current 9% approval rating:
This cycle of distrust signals something important about any successful strategy for reform: that it must come from the outside, ideally from people who have no interest in being on the inside. Citizens fit that description; so too may "citizen candidates." Imagine non-politicians challenging sitting Members of Congress, not with the expectation of winning, but with the aim of raising the cost of failing to pledge to fundamental reform by making this single issue the single issue of the campaign. The threat itself makes the pledge more credible. Fifty such threats over two or three election cycles could fundamentally reform the institution.
Such reform is the aim of Change Congress. We will pursue it by demanding of incumbents, or those who seek to be incumbents, a commitment to clear principles of change. We will enforce it by deploying an army of wiki-workers to monitor and hold accountable Members who deviate from that commitment. And we will achieve it by building an endless repertoire of examples of government misfiring because of this dependency on money. There are examples that will connect to every citizen. If we can connect these examples to a plausible path for change, then these citizens can do the rest. Because regardless of what other dependencies have accreted into the system we call Congress, dependency upon "the People" still remains.
People may think that such change is impossible, but to me the example of the 1990s term limits movement (a largely right-wing and Perotist push) suggests that a reform-oriented citizen activist movement can force legislators to embrace structural change. Or even, argues Lessig, a revolution:
We think of "revolutions" as fundamental change. But they saw revolutions (as the word more clearly suggests) as a return to founding, or true principles. Jefferson’s election got the country back to the Republican values of 1776 -- or so he thought. (John Adams had a different view.) It was a "revolution" because it restored ideals deemed fundamental.
It is in this sense precisely that we too need a revolution. And it is in this sense precisely that we too need a new "Declaration of Independence." Not independence from some colonial power. And not independence from all power. But independence from the dependency that has now overwhelmed our Congress. Independence from the improper dependence on private campaign funding, so as to return to a more perfect dependence upon "the People."
So here's the questions: (1) Would these steps restore trust in government?, (2) Can they be implemented?, and (3) What will you do to change Congress?
