Why Lawrence Lessig is Running For President
Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor famous in Silicon Valley circles, is running for President of the United States. He won't win -- in fact, he was excluded from the Democratic television debate due to his low poll numbers. Still, Lessig is running on a single issue that you should care about: campaign finance reform.
Sexy, right?
Let me drop some knowledge on you: American Democracy is a joke. So much unlimited, anonymous, so-called “dark money” pours into our political campaigns that it makes your participation irrelevant. Elections and candidates are bought and paid for and there’s nothing you can do about it -- short of electing Lawrence Lessig to the White House.
I will explain. In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Federal Election Campaign Act which (after its amendment in 1974 following Watergate) established the following rules:
1. Campaigns had to disclose who gave them money and how much they gave.
2. Individuals were allowed to give limited amounts to campaigns (today it is $2,600 to Federal races).
Sounds pretty logical, right? No one person can give huge amounts of money to any one candidate, and if they do give money it becomes public information.
Now, forget everything I just said.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in a case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that “the government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity.” In plain English this means that corporations are people and thus have the same free speech rights as people. This manifests itself in the complete and total obliteration of the intent of campaign finance reform and the corruption of our election process to its very core. In practice anyone can form a “corporation” (called a Political Action Committee or PAC), collect as much anonymous money in any quantities they please, and then spend that money on political advocacy. The people forming these shell corporations do so with the intent of influencing the outcome of a particular race and are often closely affiliated with the candidate. So this whole idea of giving limits and transparency totally goes out the window.
That’s where Lawrence Lessig comes in. He makes the point, as a New York Times article recently revealed, that a small number of immensely rich Americans finance presidential election campaigns. Here is what Lessig says:
“We’re at this place where such a tiny number of people are funding campaigns, it’s trivially easy for any major reform on the left or the right to be blocked. We’ve got to solve that problem. When you look at the problem, you ask 'why is it we have the problem?' The answer to that question is: inequality of citizens. A world where 400 families fund half the political campaigns is a world where those 400 families standing at the front of the line have enormous power in our political system. A world where Congressmen spend 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% is a world where that tiny, tiny fraction has enormous power. And it’s that inequality in political power that enables this corrupted system to happen.”
To read the transcript of his whole interview with gawker click here: “Your Representative Doesn’t Give a Shit About You” : Larry Lessig’s Plan to Fix Democracy
He is so laser focused on this issue that it is literally his only campaign promise: if elected, he will remain in office till legislation is passed to reform campaign finance (specifically the Citizen Equality Act) and then he will resign and hand the reigns over to his Vice President.
Do I think Larry will win with a strategy like this? No. But in a campaign cycle where dark horses and outsiders are picking up more media traction then ever before, it is my hope that his candidacy will at least open the discussion on fixing our broken system.
In the mean time I’m starting my own super PAC to support him: Friends of Larry Lessig. Hell, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
