One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic (Kindle Single) by Lessig Lawrence

Author:Lessig, Lawrence [Lessig, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781614520238
Publisher: Byliner Inc.
Published: 2012-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

“Bribery,” whether legal or not. Part of a “system,” as Abramoff puts it, that “needs to be changed.” “[N]ot the current cast of characters running the system,”35 but the system. A system that leads 75 percent of Americans to believe that “campaign contributions buy results in Congress,”36 and a system that earns the confidence of no more than 11 percent of the American public.37

But the fundraising game is nothing compared with a new dynamic that the Supreme Court inspired through its obliviousness in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: the dynamic force of independent expenditures within this system.

Never have I heard that influence described better than by former senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) in response to a question put to him on a panel: John Samples, from the CATO Institute, had just suggested that the evidence was inconclusive about whether money bought results in Washington. Bayh was asked whether, based on his twelve years of experience in the Senate, he too was uncertain.

There was no uncertainty in his response. Indeed, if anything, he evinced a certain terror as he told his story. For, as he put it, the critical change that has happened to D.C. is the rise of independent expenditures through the effectively anonymous entities called super PACs. These super PACs have spread fear throughout the political system. The single most frightening prospect that an incumbent now faces is that, thirty days before an election, some anonymously funded super PAC will drop $500,000 to $1,000,000 in attack ads in the district. When that happens, the incumbent needs a way to respond. He can’t turn to his largest contributors—by definition, they have all maxed out and can’t, under the law, give any more. So the only protection he can buy is from super PACs on his own side.

That protection, however, must be secured in advance: a kind of insurance, the premium for which must be paid before a claim gets filed. And so how do you pay your premium to a super PAC on your side in advance? By conforming your behavior to the standards set by the super PAC. “We’d love to be there for you, Senator, but our charter requires that we only support people who have achieved an 80 percent or better grade on our Congressional Report Card.” And so the rational senator has a clear goal—80 percent or better—that he works to meet long before he actually needs anyone’s money. And thus, without even spending a dollar, the super PAC achieves its objective: bending congressmen to its program. It is a dynamic that would be obvious to Tony Soprano or Michael Corleone but that is sometimes obscure to political scientists: a protection racket that flourishes while our Republic burns.

This is corruption. With the system of campaign contributions and also with independent expenditures, we have allowed an economy to evolve in which our representatives are not “dependent upon the People alone” but are instead dependent upon the funders. Its source is obvious. And its consequences—from the financial crisis

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