Larry Lessig describes in The Nation a three-part response to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United that will allow certain forms of corporate spending on electioneering previously prohibited. The decision overturned two of the court's prior decisions, which were not yet two decades old.
Lessig proposes publicly-financed elections; a 7-year ban on former members serving as lobbyists, and, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, a constitutional amendment that would give Congress the power to regulate campaign finance. These changes are needed, Lessig argues, because
The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.
This, unfortunately, is true. It is one reason why this organization is engaged in educating the public on new ways for more people to participate in political life. New forms of deliberative democracy, new means of funding elections through large numbers of small donor contributions, whatever it takes to restore integrity to American democracy.
Bill Corbett
...Many suppose that the court has made it impossible for Congress to restrict corporate speech. But this is wrong. While Congress can't issue a broad ban on all companies, it can target the very large class that does business with the federal government and ban those companies from "endorsing or opposing a candidate for public office."
That majority favored increases in sales and graduated income taxes on individiuals like themselves, as well as lower taxes on business. Over the weekend they had persuaded one another of Michigan's need to restore job creation, and to prevent more harm to the state's competitive position by further spending cuts on education, health care and pensions. The PBS By the People project broadcast highlights of the DP last week; click here or on the screen below for the online video of the PBS broadcast; or, click here for the detailed results of the DP and links to local press coverage.
Following up on popular dissatisfaction with the UK political system following the parliamentary expenses scandal and in advance of possible elections this May, the UK Power2010 political reform campaign convened a national face to face Deliberative Poll of 200 people during January 9-10. The agenda came from over 4,000 online submissions that were boiled down to 58 ideas on how to improve the political system.
The 29 ideas that received 50% or more support in the Deliberative Poll are now the subject of a five-week online poll that closes on February 22. The top five ideas chosen in the online poll will be adopted as the centerpiece of Power2010's national non-partisan campaign to get parliamentary candidates to pledge their support for political reform. You can view all 29 ideas and their current standing in the online poll by clicking here. As of this writing the reform ideas in the lead are proportional voting, abolition of national ID cards, and adoption of a written constitution.
Lawrence Lessig writes in The New Republic on the inadequacy of transparency as a convention of good government, alluding particularly to its troublesome role in political campaign finance.
"The naked transparency movement marries the power of network technology to the radical decline in the cost of collecting, storing, and distributing data. Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently....
"Without a doubt, the vast majority of these transparency projects make sense. In particular, management transparency, which is designed to make the performance... of government agencies more measurable, will radically improve how government works.
"But that is not the whole transparency story. There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption....
"The problem...is that not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it. "More information," as [Harvard Professor Archon] Fung and his colleagues put it, "does not always produce markets that are more efficient." Instead, "responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response....
"What does the fact of a contribution to a member of Congress mean? Does a contribution cause a member to take a position? Does a member’s position cause the contribution? Does the prospect of a contribution make a member more sensitive to a position? Does it secure access? Does it assure a better hearing? Do members compete for positions based upon the contributions they might expect? Do they covet committee assignments based upon the contributions that the committee will inspire? Does Congress regulate with an eye to whether its regulation might induce more contributions?
"There is little doubt that the answer to each of these questions is, in some sense and at some time--remember those qualifiers!--yes. In a series titled Speaking Freely, published by the Center for Responsive Politics, you can find testimony from many former members from both parties to support each of those assertions. Everyone inside the system knows that claims about influence are, to some degree, true. It is the nature of the system, as we all know.
"But there is also little doubt that it is impossible to know whether any particular contribution or contributions brought about a particular vote, or was inspired by a particular vote. Put differently, if there are benign as well as malign contributions, it is impossible to know for any particular contribution which of the two it is. Even if we had all the data in the world and a month of Google coders, we could not begin to sort corrupting contributions from innocent contributions."
We all know the aphorism, An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. Lessig provoked me to find out who said it. It was an honest politician, um, by his own definition of the term.
Therein lies the problem, and the solution, with respect to our system of political campaign finance. Lessig demonstrates how difficult it is for anyone to determine this particularly political variety of honesty without being able to read the mind of the politician in question. If the politician is denied the transparent knowledge of his or her sources of political campaign finance, we have put him or her on the same footing as the rest of us.
-- Bill Corbett
Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker endorses an innovative deliberative democracy idea, which a group called Repair California calls a citizens' constitutional convention, that aims to fix the broken state.
"The genius of Repair California's approach is twofold. First, it steers clear of "social issues"....Second, the [constitutional convention] delegates would be chosen randomly from the adult population....To have faith in such a process requires a faith in the good sense and sincerity of ordinary people -- a faith that just about everybody professes. The beauty part is that no one can know what the delegates would come up with -- which is why the idea has won such broad support."
The method is otherwise known as a citizens' assembly, which lately has been tried twice, unsuccessfully, by two Canadian provinces seeking to reform their electoral processes. The key features of a citizens' assembly of this kind are that, by design, it cannot be captured by interest groups, since none of any variety receive representation, and it is truly representative of the population, since its membership is large and randomly chosen.
Would it work? The experience of Ontario and British Columbia is that voters will not rubber stamp what the convention puts before them for a vote; the groups who are perceived winners and losers will not fail to campaign strenuously to influence their fate. But Californians are accustomed to having their hands on the steering wheel of power, via the initiative process. A process that disenfranchises narrow interests in favor of those taking the broadest view may resonate. California is a state whose formerly progressive and now much-amended constitution has come to rival its freeways as a symbol of gridlock.
-- Bill Corbett
