Lawrence Lessig's Mayday PAC aims to drive the money-changers out of the temple of American politics by fighting fire with fire. Or something.
Mayday is Lessig's very own SuperPAC, funded half by grassroots liberals and other non-Republicans, with matching funds from more traditional dark-money billionaire donors. It aims to end the reign of SuperPACs by arm-twisting 2014 congressional candidates, brandishing its own Big Money to encourage them to say something nice about campaign finance reform or else:
If a candidate for Congress wants to be inoculated from being on our target list, there is an easy way to do so: get on the right side of reform. Pledge to support one or more of the fundamental reforms listed at reform.to
Translation:
Say, dis here's a nice little campaign ya's got here...Geez, it'd sure be too bad if sumptin was tuh, ya know, happen to it....
It's a clever approach (critics say too clever by half) to a noble goal most all Americans support: getting the pernicious corrupting influence of Big Money out of politics, in order to clear the way for real reforms. But in keeping with Mayday's dependence on a motley assortment of billionaires on both the Left and the Right, such as wired right-wing libertarian Peter Thiel (donates to Paul Ryan, Club For Growth, etc.) and patrician old-school liberal Vincent Ryan (donates to Sherrod Brown, League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund, etc.), Mayday is forced to remain silent with regard to just what kind of reforms America should pursue once plutocratic money is out of the picture. It officially doesn't care. Just as Nancy Reagan sternly refused to be distracted from her Just Say No message with the famed malaprop, "I'm just here for the drugs," so too Mayday is just here for teh campaign finance reform.
Such single-mindedness is often commendable, but what happens when it meets a scoundrel who is only too happy to oblige it? In Mayday's case, what happens is New Hampshire crackpot Republican candidate for the Senate, Jim Rubens.
Amid much fanfare last week, Mayday announced its first two (of a planned five) endorsements for this election cycle, including its eye-popping endorsement of Rubens, who is up against famed carpetbagger Scott Brown in New Hampshire's Sept. 9th primary.
Mayday tries hard to signal...without ever actually saying...that its endorsement of Rubens isn't really an endorsement of Rubens at all, see, but rather an attack on Brown because his lack of attention to their non-negotiable demands has hurt their feewings, so an example must be made of him:
We are opposing former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. Brown’s record shows that he supports Citizens United, opposes federal public financing, and he was the deciding vote against the most bare-minimum disclosure statute. And after agreeing to a “People’s Pledge” in his race against Elizabeth Warren in 2012, he refuses to now.
But however much one might wish to deny it, electoral contests are zero-sum games. Two million dollars spent opposing one candidate is, inescapably, $2 million spent supporting his opponent. Mayday puts the bravest possible face on this in its back-page
paean to Rubens:
We are proud to support Jim Rubens in the New Hampshire Republican primary, a businessman and former state senate Republican, who is confronting openly an issue that too many in his party simply ignore: the corrupting influence of money in politics. Rubens supports a system of voluntary small dollar vouchers to help fund federal elections. His system would radically reduce the influence of special interests in Washington, and help restore a government responsive to the people.
But is Mayday
really "proud" to support Rubens? Is it just busting its buttons to support a candidate of whom it can be said:
- Rubens' immigration policy statement claims that "Failure to sufficiently screen ['illegal aliens'] for medical conditions is spreading disease throughout the US," and paints these same immigrants as "criminals and potential terrorists." A man who, should he somehow manage to earn a pass to the Hill dining room, could happily share a nice ripe cantaloup calf with fellow xenophobe Louie Gohmert
- Quoting Some Stuff He Found On The Internet, Rubens was caught in a minor kerfluffle during his "2nd Amendment Protection Tour" of New Hampshire gun shops earlier this year, when he sang the praises of guns on the streets and in the schools, claiming "In mass shooting incidents where you had a person inside the premises during the incident, you have an average of 2.5 people killed if there is someone with a firearm able to stop the crime in progress. In similar instances where there’s no such person with a firearm, you have an average of 18 people killed and dead." But citing Some Actual Scientifically Analyzed Data from a recent extensive study of this very question appearing in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Politifact rated this claim, with admirable restraint, "False."
- A man whose more than a little crazed 2009 blog post promoting his otherwise unremarked book agonizes that "for the first time in US history women are poised to hold more jobs than men....The collapsing number of male jobs in the increasingly female-centric economy just adds to the already harsher impact of OverSuccess on males....Full time women earnings [sic] up 33% since 1972, down for average male....Women already outnumber men in management, professional, and related occupations....Over the period 1974 to 2000, 71 percent of school shooters—all of them were males—had been previously bullied, persecuted, or physically injured....Over the last century, between 75 and 85 percent of the world’s serial killers were American and 90 percent were men." Demonstrating the true courage of his convictions, Rubens hastily took down this blog post the day he announced his candidacy for the Senate in 2013, shortly after BuzzFeed stumbled upon and reported it. Presumably someone pointed out to Rubens that among their many other OverSuccesses, the women now also have the vote.
- In a 2007 HuffPo article, Rubens forthrightly mused "Maybe unrequited GOP yearning for the 'true conservative' can no longer survive the Internet. Now that it is so easy to find and post information about candidate's pasts [sic] ....Maybe it's time for a new litmus test that does not require candidates to evolve for each new election. How about consistency over time? I would rather know that a candidate's values are firm and stable...." Like, for instance, the firmness and stability he would demonstrate just a few years later by throwing into the bit-bucket his Womens' OverSuccess rant on the eve of declaring his Senate bid.
- In that same HuffPo piece, Rubens bemoans Rudy Guliani's support for "Vermont-style civil unions for gays and legal abortions [sic]." But hey, that was 2007; certainly better men and women than Rubens were also late to arrive for the March of History. What's his position lately? "As for social issues like gay marriage, abortion and access to contraception, Rubens says he is calling for 'a temporary truce'. 'Look, I am willing to say that we just keep things the way they are in order not to have our country become another Greece,' Rubens said. 'There is still time to get our fiscal house in order and we need to be focused on those fiscal issues first.'" Still, like any good Republican candidate Rubens just can't quite seem to quit while he's ahead. Witness, just four months later, last September: "[Jeanne Shaheen] is as aggressively pro-choice as you can get. Her position is different from mine."
Meet the man Lawrence Lessig and Mayday PAC are "proud to support:" xenophobe, NRA tool, women-blamer, Belgian-sized waffler, anti-choice (and, one must assume, though I cannot document, more than likely anti-equality), and so much more. Meet Jim Rubens, Mayday PAC-endorsed candidate for the U.S. Senate. I'm not Lawrence Lessig, and I don't approve this message.
Lessig seldom misses an opportunity to credit the late, great Aaron Swartz as his inspiration for Mayday PAC. If for no other reason than for the sake of Swartz's memory, maybe it's time for him to dial that back now that Mayday has embraced shamelessness.
Please help support the movement to bring Lawrence Lessig back to his formidable and much-missed senses by encouraging him not to endorse right-wing extremists: Follow and RT @AETransparency, the Mayday intervention project on Twitter. Unlike #MayhemPACT itself, we don't want your pernicious, corrupting money; just your RTs.
6:17 PM PT: UPDATE: In his latest blog post ( http://lessig.tumblr.com/... ), Lessig bemoans the ingratitude of Jim Harper, Senior Something-or-Other at Cato Institute, for giving him guff. Giving Harper a good stiff hashtagging (#Escapethe1990s), Lessig writes "One of the most striking (and frustrating) features about debating the issue of corruption with some on the Right, even the libertarian Right, is the feeling that you’re talking to someone from another century....these critics don’t seem to recognize that the proposals they are attacking have in fact been crafted to be responsive to their own criticisms."
Which explains rather a lot, I think.