I supported Lessig's presidential campaign monetarily, even though I never thought he had a snowball's chance and also didn't think that his model of affecting change was fully thought through. As entrepreneurs, I think many of us can sympathize with the idea of knowing that there is a huge, massive problem that needs to be fixed, without necessarily having the solution fully formed.
It would have been so easy for Lessig to coast on the reputation of his extraordinary work with Creative Commons [0] and his professorship at Harvard. Instead, he (IMHO correctly) identified one of the greatest challenges of our time, political corruption. His first proposed solution, the MAYDAY PACn [1] (A SuperPAC to end SuperPACs), was a brilliant idea and an abject failure. So was his second, which was this presidential campaign. It is incorrect to say that he never had a chance, since you can see how close he was in polling [2] to qualifying for the debate, and getting into the debate would have had a huge impact on awareness of his ideas and potential solutions.
I do complain that he had fallen for the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency [3], instead of understanding the complexity required for real change. But, I give him huge props for trying both of these approaches, and I can't wait to see what his third attempt to take on political corruption will be.
Serious question: given that he didn't have a snowball's chance, why did you give him money, as opposed to giving money to some other change agent that does have a chance?
> Serious question: given that he didn't have a snowball's chance, why did you give him money, as opposed to giving money to some other change agent that does have a chance?
@tptacek, I thought of funding Lessig as what an angel investor would describe as exploring the problem space. That is, I believe he has correctly identified a huge problem, I knew he was a smart guy who would adapt to what he learned, and I was happy to support that exploration. I'm also comfortable with him pulling the eject lever once he couldn't see a path to moving his goals forward.
I will admit to seeing a relative dearth of alternative change agents.
Democracy is an information system - it is not just about politics, it is an approximation of a society's needs, wants, and its moral zeitgeist. Voting is how we add information into this.
Who wins or loses in one election is based on its instantaneous value. But this system has long oscillation times. Some may vote to signal long-term wishes (Lessig), some short-term (Sanders). Both choices I guess are fine.
I threw $n at a shot to get an honest, articulate voice on stage at an early-primary-season debate, to hopefully influence the party/eventual candidate's agenda. It didn't work. Oh well.
I have a $500 iPad sitting on my coffee table gathering dust, too, which was the bigger waste?
I gave him money, and I didn't think he had a chance to win. I just wanted to see what happens. Even though it failed, it was an interesting experiment (exhibit a, number of upvotes and comments here). Definitely worth my $20.
Getting into the debate would have had a huge impact? I disbelieve.
I think it reflects poorly on Lessig's judgment that he even considers himself qualified for the Presidency. If he wants to advance a view on a single political issue, running for leader of the free world is kinda overkill, and there's also no evidence that him becoming President would have the slightest impact on the issue Lessig cares about, unless he also plans to magically abolish the Republican House.
He has no political experience, and it sure shows. He should have tried running for the House, or even the open Senate seat in CA.
Of course he could have. Every debate has a huge impact on the news coverage and national discourse for days afterward. Bernie is forcing Hillary outside of her establishment comfort zone, just today saying she'd let "big banks fail". If Lessig's was in 2nd we'd be hearing a lot more talk of Super PACs/Citizens United.
> Lessig's judgment that he even considers himself qualified for the Presidency.... has no political experience
Compared to Trump, a bully and intellectual lightweight. Or Carson, a neurosurgeon who promotes in creationism? His poor judgement was not running, but saying he'd quit after he accomplished his goal. No one could take him seriously talking like that, and he even later admitted it was his biggest mistake.
Even though he didn't have a chance in the Presidential race. If he built a serious campaign, he could have made an impact in the debates and push for change.
I support his work and message, but even I couldn't take his campaign seriously because of his plan to resign as President after elections and campaign reform.
Bernie Sanders may or may not get the nomination; but regardless, he is making a big impact in the debate and influencing the agenda.
With all the critical "I-told-you-sos", this seems like a good time to quote Teddy Roosevelt: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
God, how I hate this quote. It's TR justifying his own worst qualities -- his impetuousity, his willingness to wade into things without thinking them through. Two years after he made that speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic) he would wade into the 1912 Presidential election, where his major accomplishment was splitting the Republican vote and therefore handing the election to the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.
Action, by itself, is not always the best thing. Sometimes action is wasted, or even counterproductive. Georges Danton called for "l'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!" and ended up getting his head cut off. Then at the turn of the 20th century the French generals picked up his slogan again and marched a generation to death by machine-gun.
Lessig is actually a good example of this; his quixotic campaign has cost him a lot of goodwill among people who agree with him on the issues and should be his core supporters. He's going to have to spend some time over the next few years rebuilding bridges that would still be standing if he hadn't himself burned them. What a waste.
Luckily for humanity, we have people who are willing to take action that others would find ill-advised. Risk aversion does not make for incredible discoveries, and an adventurous can-do sensibility drives us all onward.
Unfortunately for humanity, we have other people who are willing to take action that others would find ill-advised because they are, in fact, ill-advised. Risk aversion does not make for incredible discoveries, but has the virtue of mitigating disaster. And an adventurous can-do sensibility drives people onwards in all directions, including off cliffs.
Ralph Nader is also a pretty compelling guy, on paper. In practice, he turns out to be the reason we invaded Iraq.
But blaming Ralph Nader for the invasion of Iraq is far far below your usual standard Thomas. Even singling out Nader as an explanation for Bush’s election is pretty weak sauce.
You might first blame everyone in the Bush Administration who didn’t resign, everyone in Congress who voted to authorize Bush’s actions, foreign heads of state who went along and everyone at the UN who took the Americans WMD claims at face value, the entirety of the mainstream US media including especially the New York Times, the previous several Republican presidents who set the stage in the Middle East, US and international oil companies, the Saudis, etc.
Or if we’re just talking about the Bush/Gore election, how about blaming the Supreme Court who decided the election 5:4, Gore who gave up instead of fighting more about it, all the local officials around the country who supported efforts to disenfranchise voters, whoever designed that “butterfly ballot”, all the people in aggregate who voted for Bush or any of the above members of Congress, Bill Clinton and the Democrats in congress who were such opportunistic spineless SOBs that folks on the left spent years thoroughly fed up with them, whoever was running Gore’s ineffective grassroots campaign/GOTV efforts and did a terrible job of convincing anyone that he’d be at all different than Clinton, etc.
The point is well-taken in that votes wasted on Nader were in all likelihood votes for Gore, which would have prevented all the subsequent Supreme Court nonsense, bypassed the "butterfly ballot" effect, and...I'm sorry, your other examples are just reaching. No Nader, Gore wins.
It seems to me that one should only run for President if one actually wishes to be President, and that's the absurdity of Lessig's campaign.
I agree with you. Saying Nader "turns out to be the reason we invaded Iraq" was a really dumb way to have put it. I think my reaction to the "pox on both parties" notion is more allergic than rational.
I think there's some culpability with Nader, the magnitude of what went wrong with Bush is very high, so even a small multiplier is a big deal. But Nader is surely not the most important factor in the Iraq war.
When a team wins in football, don't you only count the final field goal that decided the game? Or do the other 60 minutes count too?
Gore lost his home state but Nader cost him the election. Gore wanted a partial recount in Florida (when a full recount would have been in his favor) but Nader cost him the election.
Curse those Green party voters for not falling in line!
Nader sapped support from Gore throughout the entire election.
Again, the problem isn't that it's wrong to run for President. The issue is that if you know you're pulling support in a close election, and you have no chance of winning, then it becomes legitimate to ask whether the point you're trying to make by running is worth the cost.
Our electoral system is broken in that it doesn't allow voters to reasonably express preferences which aren't one of the two mainstream options because of this spoiler effect. I'm not sure what the correct answer is, to complain about how "both parties are terrible" and vote for the mainstream party anyway and get more of the same and know that it will never change or to vote how you actually feel knowing that the system is rigged against allowing you to do that. I can't really fault someone for doing either.
I agree that our system is broken, but that's not news, and when you take actions within that system that cause harm, you remain culpable for the harm; you can't just appeal to a different electoral system.
The point of michael_nielsens comment has to be seen in the context it was posted. To tell the majority if the comments that it's easy to just critique but har to do things.
In that context it was actually a pretty relevant quote.
Someone putting themselves out no matter whether it turns good or bad always requires something most people don't have. It's rarely elegant or clean. Mostly just brute force and that of course have good and bad outcomes.
Normandy was bruteforce and in many ways ill-advised and a lot of men was lost in that battle, but luckily the germans kind of got caught of guard without their best general in the area.
Of course it's easy to "just be a critique". But critiques of Lessig aren't "just critiques".
Lessig's critics understand something Lessig himself seems not to: his campaign is quixotic, his goal of being a "single-issue President" is incoherent given the structure of the US government, and, in a close election year, his prospects of somehow acting as a spoiler for the party he purports to support are far greater than his prospects of actually being an agent for change.
You're welcome to disagree with any or all of that, but I don't think you can say that they don't constitute a colorable argument, and you can't dismiss them as insubstantial points. Which is, of course, the implication of the actual words quoted upthread!
It's not enough just to "put yourself out there". Anyone who does anything dramatic, good or bad, is "putting themselves out there". Boldness makes for good copy, but can't reasonably be taken as a shield from commentary.
Whether or not you agree with this it has always been the core message of Lessig's campaign: Getting special interest money out of politics should be first priority, and until we get enough citizens to care about that, it'll be extremely difficult to pass legislation that goes against any special interest.
Yes, his strategy for getting the message out was broken, but he understands his campaign was quixotic in its initial state (referendum president), and has since agreed the idea was "stupid". Since the beginning, he made known what he really wanted, at a minimum, was the chance to make this issue more of a priority among all candidates.
This is just my opinion, but being a "spoiler" for the party never really appeared to be a likely outcome for Lessig, nor did being an agent for change. The only prospect he ever really had was one of failure. Failure to deliver his message to the masses. And it's a shame, because I think a grass roots movement focused on this message might be successful with the right person and strategy behind it.
People on "our" side of the ideological spectrum are going to have an unpleasant reckoning soon with the fact that the governing that really matters happens at the state and local level. State office campaigns build a back-bench for federal politics, and the states actually do serve as laboratories for democracy, and most of the rulemaking people come into contact with are state and city rules, not federal ones.
If you want to fight corruption in politics, start by finding a way to do it in your city or state, and then try to get the idea to spread to other states. That's how cannabis is going to end up legalized; it's how death- with- dignity legislation will happen; it's also how the GOP is going to carve out reproductive health rights.
Liberals suck at this. We control a fraction of the state legislatures that the GOP does and we haven't managed to leverage control over urban centers to mitigate that.
Meanwhile, the "outsider" liberals all tilt at federal windmills. What did Lessig think was going to happen in the parallel universe where he won? The President doesn't set campaign finance policy.
He could have run for a state government office and won.
Whether nationally or at the state level, it helps the movement to have a figure on the presidential stage doing everything they can to bring special interest issues to light. Lessig's strategy was wrong, but don't think its failure should cause those after him to be discouraged. Although he probably would've had better success running for state office, Citizens United needs to be reversed, and I don't think a state-by-state movement while giving the issue little attention nationally is enough.
Although the example of marijuana legislation gaining momentum is relevant, I think it's incomparable as corruption and campaign finance reform legislation would have loads more money invested by special interest groups to oppose it.
I think it's a tough fight to be waged at any level, and the more exposure given to it the better.
Thats an opinion you are entitled to have but which I do not share.
Politics is the art the possible and sometimes it takes several years for something to gain momentum, something that often starts in futile attempts and yes often ends with not succeeding. But once in a blue moon it does and that is the important part.
You keep arguing as if there is a right way to think about these things. If that is your claim then I do not share that belief.
Doing is the only way of discovering.
That there are plenty of people that do obvious stupid things which end bad in hindsight does not cancel out that there are plenty of people who do obvious stupid things and in hindsight succeed.
We have plenty of critical thinkers in this world, it's the constructive thinkers we lack.
No. Stop. I'm not telling you to agree with me about Lessig. I'm saying that you can't suppress my critique of Lessig by arguing that criticisms is easy, and starting a doomed Presidential campaign is hard. You know what else is hard? Perpetual motion. I get to criticize people for trying that too.
Michael_nielsen simply referenced a quote because there was a lot of critique from people who have no stake in lessigs attempt and so I guess Michael felt the urge to point that it's easy to critique and even if people fails, even obviously it's quite a lot more impressive that they even try than the million of reviewers out there.
The comment I was referring to, took issue with that quote and as far as I can see TR. And have nothing to do with Lessig.
So if you want to stop anything then please stop that strawman.
No one is suppressing yours or anyones critique of lessig, but just like you are entitled to have an opinion about him I am entitled to have one about the critique of TRs quote.
No it's not an attempt at that. Its simply putting a welcome perspective on things since everyone was busy second guessing without having any stakes. He simply tried to enrich the discussion and IMO did.
Claiming someone is trying to suppress your critique, when no one is, now IS the "Peak HN" though :)
Of the three major candidates in 2000, there's no question Nader was the least likely to support military intervention anywhere. His policy intentions, many of which I support unreservedly, aren't the issue.
The issue is that he had no chance of winning the 2000 election, and by staying in, he probably cost Gore the Presidency. There's a "dispute" over whether Nader was a spoiler, but that dispute relies on the notion that a very significant fraction of Nader's voters would have broken for George W. Bush, and --- remember the margin in Florida was razor thin --- ignores the indirect impact of Nader's campaign on Gore's support and turnout.
What gives the Nader spoiler charge so much electricity is the fact that his campaign was obviously and hopelessly doomed far in advance of election day, and yet he stuck with it in order to make a point. Well, he sure made his point alright.
It's an interesting point. How does one determine when one is past the point of being a spoiler and into being a serious candidate? It seems that there is a self-fulfilling prophesy here, wherein if one is concerned about being a spoiler, then one will begin drawing votes away from other viable candidates as soon as they enter politics, and thus spoil; but yet, in order to ever become a viable candidate in the first place, one must do that.
Perhaps the counter-argument is that you could enter politics away from an election, to "test the waters" without drawing support away from other candidates. But that's not a serious way to enter politics. Or you could enter politics at a different level, a lower level. I don't know if that's a viable way for Lessig to accomplish his aim. The same type of problems he's talking about might exist in other political spheres, but they aren't the ones that seem to concern him primarily. I can buy those arguments, but they leave me uneasy for a reason I can't characterize. It reminds me somewhat of the process of becoming the mayor of the city of London [1], where you're only allowed to run once several groups of people approve of you.
It seems like Lessig is being held to a different standard, almost, because he is entering politics with a specific policy objective in mind, rather than because he himself wants to become a leader. Most politicians enter politics simply to win and become leader, and so they can be judged by whether they win. Lessig is entering to accomplish an aim, and so it is possible to criticize his candidacy on the basis of whether he'll accomplish the aim, to a degree greater than other candidates. "By entering politics to accomplish that policy, you are being disruptive rather than helpful" is the charge, and I agree that it is a reasonable charge. A President needs to be an overall effective leader, and not ignore everything but their single pet issue. From that perspective I agree with the criticism. Yet I still feel that the charge of being a spoiler is a circular argument in some way. He's only a spoiler because he's a spoiler, and once you stop defining him as a spoiler, he becomes a serious candidate. Now of course, we have reason to believe that he is not in fact a serious candidate, which is a valid criticism, but it seems like that should be the criticism ("you are going to be a bad leader because you're only focused on one issue"), rather than "you are a spoiler".
The underlying problem seems to be with how winner-takes-all voting works.
Lessig and Nader are so different though. Lessig is being perhaps overly cautious, and bailing after the Democratic Party changed the rules and excluded him from the debates (boo). Nader stayed in the 2000 race until the end, even campaigning in states where Gore and Bush were neck-and-neck.
While Nader realized he would lose the election, he made a big point of trying to capture 5% of the vote and also trying to raise additional awareness of his core agenda.
He's not bailing. He specifically refused to rule out running as an independent and is still taking donations. He also left the primary trashing the Democratic party.
One important way in which they are different is that Lessig (and his zany wacky deeply unserious I-don't-wanna-be-president campaign for president) has no appreciable constituency.
Yes, it was totally Nader and Nader voters that caused the invasion of Iraq, not the 50 million people who voted for Bush, nor the hordes of people who cheered on going to war, nor the butthurt NYPD that suppressed protests (only mentioned due to personal experience), nor the mass media that started fanning the flames and beating the drums before the dust had even settled.
Let us remember, Bush II ran on a platform of no nation building. Then an opportune event happened that made it time to perform some already-planned nation building. Why are we so sure Gore would not have approved the same invasion?
The protest vote is called so for a reason. This system takes your dissent and converts it to support by frightening you with a scarier bogeyman. I would respect its elegance if we weren't all trapped in it.
This argument might make you feel better, and it sure sounds sympathetic, but it doesn't change the fact that Nader's hopeless campaign gave the election to Bush. It's not as if the concept of spoiler candidates is new to US politics; it's how we got Clinton, the President in office at when Nader ran!
I feel fine with my decision and would do the same thing again. In fact, I voted third party in 2k4 as well.
The thing is, I don't really care that Bush II won. In fact I miss those days when most of my peers were anti-government since their team hadn't won.
I am not particularly interested in what flavor of shit I will be forced to eat, and I won't legitimize the process by asking for the one that seems less foul.
That's a rather intriguing causal chain of responsibility, though. You didn't say that Nader was a potential chain reaction for the election of Bush leading up to Iraq. No. You quite clearly said he was the reason for Iraq, and that is nothing but frothing lunacy. What kind of perverse ethics could lead to anyone but the actor who affirmed invasion (Bush) bearing responsibility for it? Or, to paraphrase from a scene in Kieslowski's film Przypadek, is someone who bumps into a person causing them to miss a train, leading them to encounter an old acquaintance, reuniting, becoming a doctor and taking the place of a colleague to deliver a lecture in another country, only to die in a plane crash - is the one who bumped him responsible for the doctor then dying in the crash? Preposterous.
I'm going to assume, I think safely, that a response that characterizes my comment as "frothing lunacy" is not one asking for further discussion with me.
Not necessarily, it's just a dramatic expression of bewilderment. Besides the whole issue of whether Nader being a spoiler and costing Gore the election as a result is even factual [1][2] (or just another intriguing but ill-supported legend like that of the disparate perceptions of Nixon/JFK on TV and on radio), there is the problem of whether blaming the person subject to an inefficiency in FPTP is overly disproportionate relatively to blaming the FPTP inefficiency itself, or the person actually responsible for the military intervention. Blaming the spoiler strikes me as a compositional fallacy at best, ethically repugnant at worse. Hell, we could even make the case that the spoiler is a victim.
This is another example of an exculpatory analysis for Nader trying to convince readers that many of his voters would have broken for Bush instead of Gore if he had dropped out. Like Wikipedia, it points out that Floridian Democrats voted in anomalous numbers for Bush, implying that Floridian Naderites were the same --- which of course they were not.
Sure they could have. But statistically, we know that they wouldn't. They'd have handed the election to Gore. Nader's core supporters are liberal, and Bush was decidedly not that.
Since you really insist on analyzing things in a two party framework -
It seems then that the democrats simply overplayed their hand from
1992-2000. They were too brazenly incongruent with their grassroots support, causing their constituents to cry uncle and look elsewhere. Getting the people to line up for what their sponsors have bought is the fundamental game, and they failed.
So in effect, Bush's invasion of Iraq was actually set in motion by
Clinton. I mean, in addition to that actual bombing he authorized.
I do not understand this argument at all. Clinton would not have invaded Iraq. Neither would Gore. To get an invasion of Iraq, you need to put Bush in the White House.
You misunderstand my above comment. I'm saying that by your reasoning with Nader, we can also say that Clinton caused Bush's actual invasion.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party each must maintain two different facets - the values they preach to their grassroots support (for votes), and the policies that their sponsors purchase (for money to run campaigns).
Clinton failed to sell his actions to traditionally democratic voters, causing them to look elsewhere instead of falling into line and voting for Gore.
The argument that a vote for nader is a vote for bush is flawed. The basic premise of voting is that you vote to support a candidate and or a set of ideas you align with. Its a step better than voting "none of the above" as it provides an idea of what you would prefer.
The concept of voting for the "lesser of two evils" just further perpetuates the mess that we find ourselves in today.
Ideologically, from a single voter's perspective, you're right. But practically, and looking at the entire population, it's not. The first past the post voting system we use will always result in two prominent parties, and the spoiler effect certainly exists.
We're sure Gore wouldn't have "approved the same invasion" because...
Wait. Were you even fucking AROUND in 2002? W didn't just "approve" the invasion. Are you aware of recent history?
Let me fill you in. Gore wouldn't have "approved" of invading Iraq because his entire fucking administration would not have been packed with Nixon-era holdovers who were criminally obsessed with re-invading Iraq. This isn't complex or controversial. There is no fucking chance that Gore would have invaded Iraq.
Sure, Bush II's administration was packed with such people. But it's a stretch to say the inverse would have been true for Gore, especially since he never named a cabinet. National policy had been decided some time before that - remember Clinton bombing etc? Your referenced gang of holdovers shows exactly how that works.
The democratic party is traditionally better at selling domestic totalitarianism, but what exactly would be the point of letting an opportunity such as 11SEP2001 pass them by? I don't think the democratic sponsorship had a different country lined up to attack, and going after Iraq was already on the agenda, so they would have been beating those exact same war drums. There would probably have been more sustained bombing and less ground forces, but I'd call that a flavor.
No, only Neocons would have invaded Iraq. They're called "Neocons" because they break from the Baker/Scowcroft isolationist foreign policy that was mainstream in conservatism at the time. The "neo" part is almost literally "new willingness to send ground troops".
I'll concede the point since "invasion" implies the large ground force and land occupation, and democrats seem to favor death from above. I do think that Iraq would still have been invaded sometime, given that repaving the country was on the bipartisan national agenda. Those rats in W's cabinet would have been waiting in the wings for 4 more years.
Fundamentally I'm not going to support terrible event A in an attempt to stop terrible event B from happening, especially when there is a large contingent
of people with different priorities doing the reverse. That's a setup for manufacturing popular support for a lot of terrible events.
Also is predicated on the notion that Nader voters would have went for Gore. That's hilarious. Do these people actually know true leftists? I bet he even thinks if Sanders doesn't win (likely) that we would vote for Hillary.
Nader even concentrated on states where Bush and Gore were neck-and-neck.
> A first, eloquent protest came 10 days ago from a group of a dozen former 'Nader's Raiders,' who asserted that their former mentor had broken a promise not to campaign in states where he could hurt Gore and begged him to reconsider doing so.
Absolutely true, so long as humanity is made of billions of individuals all pulling in their own direction, there will be risk, disaster, death, destruction, and amazing advancement.
Don't lay the blame at his feet. Just as Bushies can't blame Perot for Clinton.
No, everyone deserves the votes they get (earned). He deserved those votes as much as Gore or Bush deserved the votes they got. Lest we forget, the congress with lots of Dems voted for the war. So, no, no politician can claim another "stole" "their" vote. They only get the votes they deserve by which I mean the ones they win fair and square. Nader won his votes fair and square.
> Ralph Nader is also a pretty compelling guy, on paper. In practice, he turns out to be the reason we invaded Iraq.
Or, possibly, the reason we didn't nuke Afghanistan. Remember, prior to the actual invasion Clinton sent more missiles into Iraq than the Bushes put together; JFK started and LBJ escalated the Vietnam Wars: who knows what Gore would have done, presented with the attacks on 11 September 2001?
There are a total of zero serious observers who believe Al Gore would have "nuked Afghanistan", but there's a nonzero number who believe 9/11 might not have happened had he been elected.
Al Gore is not a particularly great human being, but in addition to the banal malevolence George Bush shares with Al Gore and every other politician, and the additional evil he shares with the Neoconservative political movement he belonged to, Bush was also, as it turns out, alarmingly incompetent.
I think when in the hot seat most actors gravitate toward a status quo equilibrium. The left presidents will lean a little more right, the right will lean a little more left. Obama took us to Syria, would you have guessed he would do that when he was campaigning?
I think Gore would have been walked into Iraq warring and more by his advisers.
This perspective totally ignores the history of the Iraq war, and the distinctive influence of Bush's idiosyncratic cabinet and vice president, all of whom had outsized influence due to Bush's own weakness.
The idea that Gore would have invaded Iraq in response to an attack from Afghanistan is not well supported by evidence, and not common among historians.
Just making this argument is a kind of "tell" that the arguer refuses to entertain the idea that third-party candidacies can harm the country by splitting the vote. I guess there are intellectually consistent ways to make that argument, but "Gore would have invaded Iraq" is not one of them.
Now, is there a colorable argument that Gore would have invaded Afghanistan and embroiled the US in costly military adventurism abroad? Sure. But somehow making 9/11 be about Iraq, which it patently was not, is a pathology unique to Bush.
I'm no fan of Gore's, but I don't see a Gore administration using the opportunity that 9/11 presented to work out both a commitment to a new way of warfighting and a hyper-muscular American foreign policy by attacking what was well understood at the time to be an unrelated sovereign power.
Of course people are going to fail even again and again. You are somehow assuming that there are ways to know. But if anything we learned it is that it's trough trial and error and luck that we mostly succeed not trough armchair strategy sessions.
You seem to have an issue with TR that clouds your ability to understand whats important in that quote IMO.
How many people do you think advised Obama against running for president?
You don't know before you try. You don't even know if Lessig very well knew that the didn't have a big chance but just wanted to see if he could build political momentum behind is case.
Of course we can have opinions about what he did but ultimately those are not important. Even my opinions about those opinions are not important.
The only thing that is important is that some people try and whether they fail or succeed the fact that they do, despite the obviousness of the failure that we can sit and look at afterwards it's more important that someone does that than someone comment on it.
In the political game giving voice even to minority of the voters is an important part of the democratic proces. If not enough voter gets behind it they fail but at least they have the opportunity to try.
At least to me that was the gist of the quote and the reason for the quote.
Being able to claim that Lessig was obviously wrong for even trying has zero value.
There are far more people in the world who will happily point out the obvious truth that if your undertaking doesn't succeed it will fail, than people who will give a rational analysis of why a given undertaking is a bad idea. Teddy Roosevelt's quote is addressed towards the former, not the latter.
There's a sleight of hand happening in your comment. He's not saying "if you don't succeed, you'll fail". He's saying "if you don't succeed, you'll fail, and could harm the world in the process". But by reframing it in the most uncharitable possible way, you've made that sensible point sound ridiculous.
Can someone give me a rundown of how anyone expected anything different to come out of this? Polling at 0% isn't exactly fixed by a televised debate. Sanders is competing with Hillary on a fairly close scale and yet a lot of people still say he has no chance (though I definitely think he does at this point, but I'm not a US citizen so...), so what could possibly happen with Lessig?
Lessig never wanted to be president; he wanted a podium. But you can't say that. If he indicated he wasn't serious about being president in any way, they never would have let him on stage.
That being said, I think it's shameful he hasn't endorsed Sanders. Lessig acts like he's the only one working on it. Whether or not you like Sanders, he is the only viable candidate whose core issue is overturning Citizens United. I realize Sanders is less known for that and more known for democratic socialism, which is probably Lessig's hesitation. However, it always bothered me how little Lessig acknowledged the only candidate on either side with any chance of initiating campaign finance reform. If he really cared about campaign finance reform, he'd be out stumping for Sanders rather than this "running for president" publicity stunt.
>Lessig never wanted to be president; he wanted a podium. But you can't say that. If he indicated he wasn't serious about being president in any way, they never would have let him on stage.
I guess that's the difference between the Democratic party debates and the Republican party debates. I know that sounds like a troll, but it's not. The GOP primary debates had 17 people running, the Democratic primary had 5 (not counting Lessig). No one seriously thinks that Lindsey Graham is going to be the nominee, nor did anyone think that he could be the nominee when he ran. He's a single issue candidate (national security) and his agenda is make sure this issue is discussed during the primaries. The same thing with Santorum and Huckabee ("traditional values"). It's not a new phenomenon. Back in 1988, Pat Robertson ran with a "Christian conservative" agenda, but no one seriously thought that he was going to be president. His role was to highlight the power of the conservative evangelical Christians in the Republican party, thus causing the eventual nominee to (and the party as a whole) to pay attention to their issues. There's nothing with this tactic, and it may even be effective. But it seems like it's more prominent on the national stage in the Republican Party than the Democratic Party.
As much as I hate to defend Lindsey Graham, I honestly think he's running for the VP slot. He would make an appealing VP for the Republican base -- hawkish on defense and a veteran of senate dealmaking.
That is one of the analyses I've heard. The other is that he's playing a bit of a coach, making the eventual nominee hone his foreign policy prior to the general.
The only reason why I chose Lindsey Graham for my example, was that he's stuck in JV debates, and had I could articulate a reason for his candidacy -- as opposed to Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, or George Pataki. I honestly can't figure out why their staying the race, except for perhaps for personal marketing reasons.
Not that I think he was looking to get put into a hypothetical future Democratic cabinet, but where could he have ended up at, had he greater visibility? Supreme Court? DoJ?
The difference is really the level of popular support. Even Graham and Santorum, who weren't even on the "main stage" of the recent GOP debate, have won U.S. Senate elections and have national name recognition that far outstrips Lessig.
Lessig seems to think that if he eked his way onto the stage of a televised Democratic debate, he'd have a chance of jump-starting a national political campaign on the issue of campaign finance.
But it's actually the reverse: you only get onto a debate stage if you already have a campaign. The polling criteria is not a gotcha. It's just the easiest way to ensure that only people with actual popular traction get stage time. The debate is not intended to be a "big intro" opportunity. There are other events for that, like the convention (Obama), or big events like the Prayer Breakfast (Ben Carson).
In part the difference in the numbers between the parties is simply that there is no clear favorite on the GOP side, while there is an overwhelming favorite on the Dem side. There are a lot of senior Democrats who have chosen to sit this one out rather than challenge Hillary.
Lessig's agenda wasn't to overturn Citizens United, it was public financing of campaigns. Nobody --not Sanders nor Lessig -- is going to push that through Congress any time soon.
Citizens United is probably doomed under Clinton if she's elected, no less than under Sanders. Demographically Kennedy, Scalia, or Thomas is likely to be replaced in the next five years and very likely in the next nine and CU hangs by a single vote on the Supreme Court.
Of course, reversing CU will actually make things worse from Lessig's stated perspective. With less independent money and with outside voices silenced, politicians will either be more entrenched with special interests or forced to spend even more time raising money from business executives. Unless you have a full restructuring of the system with public financing, most any plausible change isn't going to improve things.
Firstly: I'm not in the US, and fairly left leaning even for someone outside the US. That said:
I think that the US progressive establishment's fixation on the Citizen's United case is misguided.
I'm biased towards the idea that speech should be free, and tend to think that this should include spending money on making your view heard.
I think that effort could be better spend on attempting to fix the problem of wrong speech: if people are pushing political agendas using things that are factually incorrect that should be restricted. IANAL, but I think that this is likely to be more legally achievable in the US too: IS libel laws have a model of truth as a defense, and it seems to me this could be a framework for regulating false political speech.
Your proposal would run smack up against the First Amendment. Both right and left will will reject any sort of speech control out of hand here in the USA.
But if you can explain how overturning Citizen's United wouldn't run into that problem while this idea I'd find that helpful.
OTOH, Libel in the US is already a thing. I'm saying extending those laws to make "the American people" a group that has standing, and falsehoods something that has harm. There is some existing precedent for that under libel.
The problem with CU isn't the 1st Amendment, it's corporate personhood and the press.
It's easy to argue that corporations and unions don't deserve free speech as their directors, employees and members are all entitled to free speech individually.
However the press is different. Nobody, rightly so, wants to limit the press to say and print whatever they like (so long as it's not slander/libel) and today's press is made up of corporations.
How do we keep a free press and silence other corporations?
Oh yeah, the corporate personhood thing. I forgot that.
But I only forgot about it because I simply don't see how that matters in an real way.
Even if corporate personhood went away then (actual, real human) people would be paid to speak for a corporation, and then you hit the the 1st Amendment rights issues again.
>Even if corporate personhood went away then (actual, real human) people would be paid to speak for a corporation
There are proper campaign finance laws which regulate the above. Nothing is currently regulating SuperPACs at the moment, even American divisions of foreign corporations can accept money.
People decry career politicians and wish for an alternative, and when we finally get an outsider like Lessig to run and he's weak and apologetic about what he'd do if he won (pass some reforms, step down). That's such bullshit, he should have run like anyone else and then I would have supported him.
It would be quite easy to overturn Citizens United, a weak 5-4 decision borne of highly-questionable provenance, without touching the First Amendment in any way.
The plaintiffs in Citizens United, lest we forget, wanted to be permitted to release a movie critical of a presidential candidate during an election. If that is made illegal again, that strikes me as being quite definitely against the spirit of the First Amendment.
Lest you forget, the plaintiffs wanted to bash Hillary Clinton around and run infinite quantities of ads with infinite anonymous funding for said ads, too, to support "Hillary: The Movie", which wasn't actually a movie that they wanted to release, btw, it was actually a big long TV ad.
Lessig didn't (just) want to overturn Citizens United, he wanted to make campaigns publicly financed. Meaning: the Government will spend your tax money to buy advertisements for politicians.
I think that's a terrible idea, and as long as Lessig is flogging it, he won't get my support.
Yes, please spend my tax money so you can do you job, write laws that serve my interests. Please stop spending most of your time chasing special interests for money, stop writing laws that serve the needs of those special interests over mine.
That is exactly what I want. Why do you think it is a terrible idea? I'd eve hazard a guess that the money we save from reducing tax loop holes, bad contracts, subsidies and other pork could cover much of the cost of the public funding.
We have public election funding in Canada and it has ushered in the end of days. The voteman came for my last neighbour yesterday. I am certain he will come for me soon. I will save the last bullet for myself. Let this be a lesson to all those who are tempted by public election financing.
He still could. In the AMA he seems to like Sanders a bit, but Lessig advocated a different approach that he "thought" would be more effective. Now that Lessig has realized it didn't work, I wouldn't be surprised by an endorsement.
As far as I understand, at least per Lessig's team:
Dems said in order to participate in debate, you must poll 1% in three polls IN the six weeks prior to the debate. Depending on what polls were counted, Lessig either qualified or were one poll away from doing so.
Dems then “clarified” rules as being 1% in three polls AT LEAST six weeks prior to the debate.
Considering that the margin of error is usually around 3-4% for public opinion polls, a candidate whose best argument for inclusion is "I've been hovering at around one percent lately!" is going to have a tough row to hoe.
Perhaps then they should have made the threshold for qualifying higher? That argument sounds like the "Mike Goldman" side of the argument from the $5000 compression challenge.
By participating in the debate, presumably Lessig could have at least gotten his issue out there. As others pointed out months ago in reference to Sanders[1], a "win" wouldn't necessarily be getting the nomination, but in getting the nominee to endorse positions that they wouldn't have otherwise.
I would've liked him to participate in at least one debate to discuss the corruption of money in politics.
Unfortunately, even if they would've allowed him in the first debate, he totally murdered that chance by saying he will quit as soon as he fixes this issue. Even if he really wanted to do that, he would be lucky if he solved that issue in one mandate, making it completely unnecessary to announce before even the first debate that he would quit during his first mandate.
So it seems Lessig isn't a great politician, but I still think he's a great activist for this issue.
He could have at least gotten the chance to make it to the debate stage, spread knowledge of his issue and proposals, and gotten it absorbed by the other, more viable candidates.
I'm not sure Lessig expected anything different to come out of this. Sometimes people run to draw attention to some ideas, rather than because they think they have a realistic chance.
In other words, Lessig didn't need to win in order to win. (Whether he actually won, in the second sense, is a different question...)
I get what you're saying but, is that really the case? Did he "win"? Most people around the debate didn't even know there were more than 2-3 candidates; if you tell them about Lessig they'll ask you if that's a country or a city.
The freedom to shout at strangers on sidewalks is a meaningless one in terms of ability to add your ideas to the national political dialog. All meaningful political speech in the modern day has some kind of money spend behind it -- including your posting here on this comment thread. And if we raise the bar from "I guess theoretically this might potentially affect something" to "obviously meaningful speech," then the money spends become quite large.
If the government can restrict any and all money spends on political speech, it can suppress all meaningful political speech. This is the absolute core of the First Amendment.
That's absurd. The government can guarantee equal speech instead of allowing some speech to dominate everyone else.
How can the 1st Amendment be protecting the voice of the poor if they have no avenue of expression? And when their views are beaten down by the few rich. That is not at all in the spirit of the first amendment or of democracy.
> The government can guarantee equal speech instead of allowing some speech to dominate everyone else.
How? What do you mean "the government can guarantee equal speech"? Do you mean they should disallow some speech from dominating other speech? Who decides what to censor, and how is that done, for example, on the internet? Is that not a form of censorship itself?
> How can the 1st Amendment be protecting the voice of the poor if they have no avenue of expression?
How can you say they have zero avenue? They can rally within their community with no money at all. MLK and other civil rights activists made some of the biggest changes in this country through their speech alone, and they never even held office. He may have even received donations or media support from companies employing large numbers of black people. Would you say that is unfair too?
I also want us to find a better way to end corruption in politics. I just don't think it is so simple, and free speech and the ability to spend your hard earned money on what you want, regardless of whether you're poor or wealthy, is the core of the first amendment. I'm not sure about Joe Shmoe CEO + board deciding to donate company earnings, which are not all their own, to a super PAC or secretive non-profit of their choosing. That's ~20 people deciding where the money of 100s of hard working people goes.
Is it easy to fix that? Are laws themselves enough, or do we also need to be able to enforce them? What happens when some business claims their money was not spent in support of a political campaign, but it supports a foreign company who is advertising online?
The 1st Amendment does not attempt to guarantee equality of "voice," just the opportunity to speak. It especially does not attempt to guarantee equality of voice by silencing some arbitrary group.
And even if it did, which, again, it really does not, it wouldn't do it by the avenue of declaring that "money is not speech" and thus that there are no restrictions on the government preventing people from spending money on speech.
Imagine thinking a person shouldn't be able to rent billboard space for a month and say their congressman sucks because thats not covered under free speech
Actually it is. For when you show willingness to silence one form of speech by anyone you forever give up your right to form any association to do similar.
While many of us do not like all the money in politics how people assemble to pool that money should not be the concern. The concern should be and always should be how politicians routinely ignore the rule of law and Constitution and twist the words to deliver the outcome they desire.
If anything, they would love restricting who can put money into politics as all their personal avenues of funding are protected.
No. I'm sorry, but spending money is not speech. Restricting the amount of money that one can donate to political campaigns would be perfectly fine, and would not infringe upon anyone's rights at all.
The amount you can donate to a political campaign is already limited at $2700.
Your right, spending money isn't speech. However, preventing someone from buying an advertisement to display a message and they are denied because its deemed 'political' is definitely limiting someones free speech. It doesn't matter if the message is 'America Rocks', 'Shop at this new store here', or 'John McCain sucks please stop voting for him'; if your gonna limit some but not others because the message is deemed political then you no longer have free speech.
I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is that concerns in this area often center around donations to political action committees, rather than to campaigns directly, although both are matters of concern. A "SuperPAC" backing a candidate may receive an unlimited amount of donations, and may spend it to support their candidate as long as they don't coordinate too closely with the candidate's campaign. They must remain sufficiently independent for it to count as independent expenditure, in which case the donations and expenditure are unlimited.
Unlike regular political actions committees, which can donate to candidates and must report who they receive donations from in turn, Super PACs are not required to report their sources of income.
This essentially means that people are free to spend unlimited amounts of their own money talking about their favored political candidate, though they can't donate unlimited amounts to the politician's campaign.
I don't have a strong personal stance on this issue, but I consider the ruling fundamentally fair. If I want to spend an unlimited amount of my own money buying advertising space to raise awareness around global warming, I can do that. That's speech, and large-scale speech takes money. I should be able to do the same thing to support a political candidate.
Spending money is necessary in order to speak to a large audience. You need money to rent space to use as meeting halls, or to buy advertising space like billboards or newspaper space, or even simply run a website. The more traffic, the more eyeballs, the more people impacted, the more it costs. Speech in the real world costs money.
The presidential election isn't won in the town square, where everyone can hear him gather to speak simultaneously. That might work for mayoral elections of small towns, but it does not work for a nation of 318 million people. And besides, who is going to pay to rent an auditorium for a town hall meeting?
The citizens deserve to hear their elected leaders and candidates speak, and it requires a considerable amount of money to reach such a large audience. (Note that donating air-time or website space or advertising for a candidate is tantamount to donating money.)
What is the serious alternative? Political candidates are limited in their ability to get their message out, based on where they can travel (no money for transportation), and the people they can speak to directly in person? How will democracy function at scale? Presidential candidates are pilgrims, traveling the country by foot? They'll have a hard time reaching a few hundred thousand people at best.
If we did not allow political contributions, and we did allow candidates to spend their own money on their campaigns, then only wealthy billionaires would become successful national politicians. Indeed, many successful politicians are extremely rich, like Mitt Romney (estimated net worth: $250 million), and candidates like Donald Trump rely largely on their wealth. Small-time candidates would have zero chance against them if contribution were not allowed, even while billionaires are spending their personal fortunes.
Now, to be a fair, a purely representational democracy could perhaps function on this basis. The people in a local area elect their local leader, who travels to the capital of a territory to mingle with other local leaders, and from them elect a higher leader, and so on, such that at each level campaigning is all word-of-mouth. But that's an idea that I think will fail in reality at the scale of the USA.
You're not entitled to speak to a large audience. And I'm not saying to completely ban political donations. I'm saying to severely limit them. Let every citizen donate $500/year to political causes, no more.
The budgeting problems of campaigns are not my concern. The ability of a few wealthy elites to completely dominate the political conversation simply by having more money, and therefore more speech, is.
The Supreme Court's job is to decide what laws are legal, not what they think the law ought to be. Deciding what the law ought to be is Congress's job.
Do you suppose that nine Supreme Court justices might have considered and already dismissed your three-word argument in their lengthy decision on the subject?
He hasn't ended his Presidential campaign. He's ended his bid for the Democratic nomination. David Weigel at WaPo asked him if he would run (pointlessly) as an independent; Lessig would (unsurprisingly) not rule that out. Note that he is still taking donations.
It has only been 15 years since Ralph Nader got W elected for two terms and cost us about $10 trillion in stupid wars and bad economic decisions, and just about destroyed the US economy to boot.
Do you already need yet another new lesson on why Lessig running as an independent could easily be disastrous? Really?
The person Lessig would theoretically be Nadering, you do realize that as a Senator she voted on the wrong side of all of those bad things you're pointing out, right?
There are probably very few people on this thread who would pick Hillary Clinton as their dream candidate, but there's also very few people here who think that she wouldn't be a million times better than President Cruz.
Based on the actual voting record, on the most serious issues, she's about on par with the worst president of the modern era. Cruz and Trump would be worse, sure, but not by "a million times", more like 2x.
Four years of letting Republicans remind everyone how terrible they are at governing for a chance to be rid of Clinton for good and take back Congress and the White House in 2020? Maybe worth it.
You seem to be deeply confused. Hillary casting a pro forma vote for something does not equate in any way with initiating the thing in question.
Deep down, you know this, of course. You know it's blatantly silly for you to say that Hillary Clinton is "on par" with W. But somehow your filter just failed to kick in.
I agree that she is on par with Bush, honestly. She's been central to an administration that has conducted just as much war and added just as much debt as Bush's.
And I would also pick Trump over her, if only out of sheer morbid curiosity.
I'm conflicted or perhaps uninformed about what could be the real solution for reducing corruption in politics.
I am against corporations spending large sums of money to influence politics because in the long term the rights of individuals, particularly groups of individuals who do not have a lot of money, erode. This weakens our founding fathers' protections against tyranny of the majority.
I'm also very pro free speech on the individual level. And I feel if I ran my own company I would want to be able to advertise and even lobby for policies in which I believe.
Yet sometimes wealth comes from being at the right place at the right time, or wealth grows on wealth. And, in the interest of advancing society, I am not okay with our representatives being elected based on who threw them the most money. It's supposed to be one person one vote, not one dollar one vote.
Still, even without the super PACs, won't corporations simply find another way to spend money to influence politics? Is this how it worked before 2010? Do we benefit from the the current system by being able to actually track the donations?
Does anyone know in detail the solution Sanders or others have in mind?
Sanders supports a Constitutional amendment to allow Congress to regulate campaign finance; in other words, Sanders would support the first Constitutional amendment in the history of the US to deliberately abridge the First Amendment, and would do so to regulate political speech.
Thanks for your reply. So presumably this would bring us back to the state of things from 1971 with the entrance of the Federal Election Campaign Act, including the limitation on spending money on media?
It sounds tricky. The most powerful thing about free speech is the right to say whatever you want about your government. But given the apparent level of corruption, maybe it's time to limit corporations' ability to make political speech. Is that what he's proposing?
I read this on publicintegrity.org,
> It wasn’t until 1971 that Congress got serious and passed the Federal Election Campaign Act, which required the full reporting of campaign contributions and expenditures. It limited spending on media advertisements. But that portion of the law was ruled unconstitutional — and that actually opened the door for the Citizens United decision.
Sanders' amendment essentially says that nothing in the First Amendment can be construed to limit Congress's ability to protect the integrity of elections, and (this is explicit in the amendment and without precedent anywhere else in the Constitution) from the wealthy.
He delegates to Congress the details on how to use that new power to suppress the First Amendment.
Darn, I disagree. It's the first amendment for good reason. I want to like someone who will really do something about this but I think this solution is a rabbit hole.
Free speech is the most basic protection individuals have for asserting their rights. Elections follow. As much as I'd love to see political corruption reduced, I think those things are already in the proper order of importance in the constitution.
Maybe we can try out his amendment for a few years, but it would be nice to have some further open and public discussion about what might happen with that new amendment in place.
What happens, for example, if a foreign company starts supporting a US political candidate? Would a US company be allowed to invest in said foreign company, or buy their products? Would we start censoring the internet for unlawful political advertisements?
When you start telling people that they can't build their own platforms, you're getting to a place where "you can say whatever you want" becomes a pretty empty principle.
You've already said this 2-3x elsewhere in this thread and people gave you thoughtful replies there. I agree mostly with the counter arguments you received.
Do you not see how difficult it is to identify what money is being spent in support of political campaigns and what money is not? Or, do you trust people who are corrupting politics to properly label how they are spending money as either a) on politics or b) not on politics? If not, who will figure it out and how? What if a foreign company starts advertising online? Do we censor that? Do we forbid US companies from investing in them which is a form of indirect support?
The whole reason I posted the above was to raise awareness that simply ending citizens united is not a whole solution unto itself. It may just drive the money underground and make it harder to track. We need a real public, open discussion about this, giving proper thought to everyone's ideas, or we'll never move forward
I do normally agree with your posts but this seems ... distressingly principled, if you like :)
If we adhere to the idea that "money is speech" (Buckley v Valeo) and resist all attempts at suppressing speech, how do we avoid an eventual slide into plutocracy when upwards of 90% of all elections these days are won by the candidate who spends the most money?
They get won by getting the most votes. And how do they get the most votes? Well, by persuading the most people (of those who bother to vote) that your position on the issues is the one that will work the best for them. Getting that message out takes money. And how do you get the money? Well, by persuading the people who give money to politicians that your position on the issues is the one that will work the best for them.
"The most money" and "the most votes" are not completely unrelated, and they're not related only by "money lets you yell the loudest at easily-influenced voters". Campaigns attract money for the same reason they attract votes; it's not surprising to see a large correlation.
I don't know what I think about campaign finance reform. On the one hand I have the obvious concerns about money buying influence. On the other hand, money tried real real hard to buy the 2012 election and failed comically.
Meanwhile, the free speech issues involved in regulating campaign spending, while admittedly very inconvenient for all of us, are real, and no appeal to plutocracy extinguishes them.
Certainly: the approach Sanders seems to take to this problem, of literally amending the Constitution to neuter to First Amendment and then delegating to Congress --- yes, this Congress --- an unlimited power to regulate political speech, is not OK with me.
There are lots of reforms I want to see happen at the federal level. Sentencing reform, accountability for prosecutors, financial markets regulation, health care, school funding, health care, drug decriminalization, and health care are all I think good targets for top down federal regulation. Campaign finance, I think, might be a better thing for states to grapple with first.
You're right that there isn't a lot of evidence about whether money influences elections. But ultimately it doesn't matter whether money influences elections. What is more important is whether elected officials believe money is influential in elections, and I think this is trivially true.
What are your fears if "The Democracy is for People Amendment" passed? Are you worried that the congress would limit political spending too much? Or are you worried that the amendment doesn't specifically separate political spending from political speech well enough?
I read this as specifically giving congress the authority to set limits on raising and spending money. I don't see any language granting them to ability to restrict political speech.
SECTION 1.To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.
The only thing it authorizes is limits on "the raising and spending of money ... to influence elections", it doesn't address speech as distinct from raising and spending money at all. So it seems to separate them quite distinctly.
It's important when discussing topics like this to note that as long as the Republicans control all/part of Congress Sanders has absolutely no chance of getting this plan passed if he becomes President. In terms of what they could actually get done there is very little difference between Sanders and Hillary.
That's totally fair. I'm interested in hearing the proposed solutions of the most viable candidates because I feel they've probably given it the most real thought.
I also think we do should not leave the entire decision to them without further discussion simply because we trust they have a solid plan. We should seek to understand that plan.
I think we as a people need to revisit and discuss the topic of freedom of speech and campaign finance reform given today's climate of large corporate spending. Either a) businesses have figured out how to take advantage of the system in new ways, or b) the public is now waking up to the fact that this is happening and has always happened.
Regardless of whether a) or b) is true, we need to understand this topic and contribute towards an informed decision about it. The first amendment is too important to allow the solution to only come from selected politicians and academics. We need more open discussion, in my opinion, and since Lessig is pushing the issue, let's take advantage of that and support him.
Yeah, exactly. Even if they try to limit it from US corporations, couldn't a multi-national or seemingly separate foreign company just start advertising online?
Then you have to deal with regulating the internet. And, we don't want that because it opens the door to individuals' voices being censored too.
What a can of worms. I'm glad I'm just a programmer.
The best and only constitutional solution is to publicly fund all federal elections. 2 billion a year could fully fund all congressional elections. You don't even need to fund the presidential election because the two parties raise more than enough money themselves. They are already buying literally all the commercial time on TV in swing states. More money doesn't provide much marginal benefit at that stage.
That wouldn't prevent companies from funding PACs, but it would greatly reduce their influence.
I'm not overly familiar with Lessig, but I believe he proposed the public funding option on a RealTime with Bill Mayer.
I'd also increase individual donation limits. Upper Middle Class people throwing 20k to a campaign for shits and giggles doesn't carry the same sort of risk as Boeing giving 500k and then asking for a defense contract.
Okay, I've heard that, but then how do we decide who gets to run? Wouldn't the wealthiest still end up with the best initial campaigns?
[side-rant]
This makes me think that being able to include more candidates, by way of reforming FPTP and using an alternative vote, could be as important as campaign finance reform.
I am over this two party system that controls everything. They're corrupting our democracy by gerrymandering and barring candidates from debates. And since they control the rules about how primaries work, and we really only have these two parties as a result of FPTP, we effectively do not have the democracy our founders tried to promise. The rules that protect democracy at the national level are not operating at the primary level.
You're absolutely right. That's why Lessig's proposed Citizen Equality Act has multi-member districts with ranked choice voting (effectively ending gerrymandering) as the second major component: https://lessig2016.us/the-plan/
That sounds great. Is he friends with someone who holds office and can make it happen? Say, Warren?
However it goes, I hope we continue to raise awareness and rally support for these reforms. That simple image that shows how gerrymandering works is a real eye opener, for example. And all politicians are guilty for being complicit in that behavior, unless I'm misinformed and there's some legitimate reason for redrawing district lines.
This link doesn't work for me (completely blank page) and his Facebook page doesn't say anything about him dropping out.
(For those curious: from the US, using Chrome, no ad or privacy block - Facebook is outputting 21 lines of HTML and then nothing. Looks like PHP is just dying for some reason)
The tl;dw is that the Democrats changed their debate qualification threshold from polling at 1+% < 6 weeks before the debate to polling at 1+% > 6 weeks before the debate. This means Lessig went from probably-in-the-next-debate to definitely-not. He figured if the Democrats are actively changing their rules to disqualify him, his effort is probably best spent on things other than running for a primary that doesn't want to include him.
Nobody in this thread seems to be talking about the strange change of rules by the Democrats. Why did this change in rules come about? As I understand it was a retroactive change? Very odd.
Um... Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the DNC, was the co-chair of Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign. It's no secret she wants Hillary to win the nomination.
It's actually a pretty fucked up system. The rules for qualification into the debates are decided by Wasserman Schultz and her alone, so the "rules" end up being in practice "will this make Hillary Clinton look good or bad?". Lessig's inclusion ran the risk of making Hillary look bad - by calling her out on her corporate donors - so he was excluded. Clearly this is not how we should have public debates about the future of our country.
For what it's worth, Wasserman Schultz is already under fire for restricting the Democrats to only 6 national debates. Almost every other executive in the party thought this was a bad move since it gives the Republicans significantly more airtime, but remember the rules are decided by Hillary Clinton's campaign co-chair.
What's interesting is that even Hillary is now complaining about the minimal debate schedule. It's denying Democrats a chance to make their case, not just to undecided Democratic primary voters, but to the nation in general. It rings even more true after the superb first debate, which made Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O'Malley all look really great (and with Webb and Chaffee both dropped out, future debates will be even better).
I think some of the poor decision-making for the restricted debate schedule was a reaction to 2008, when Democrats had 25 debates. It was distracting and exhausting. We're seeing it in comparison here, where the Republicans have far more candidates and a much busier debate schedule, which is winning them a lot of attention outside of Republican circles.
As much as I love Lawrence Lessig, I'm glad for this. "Celebrity single-issue candidate" is a poor role for him, a terrible waste of his talents. He deserves better, and the Democratic Party would do well to recognize him for it. An explicit, high profile advisory role for either Bernie or Hillary (or whoever wins the nomination) would be fantastic. Maybe even a Cabinet seat.
But president? What's that supposed to accomplish? If you can't break out of the nerd ghetto, it's not relevant.
My biggest concern is that the only official job of the President is to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Lessig is a fantastic policy wonk, but a single-issue candidate has no business leading the military, even though that was effectively the job he was going out for.
Why not? His plan[1] isn't to overturn or defy Citizens United; he wants to modify and enhance public funding of elections so that it doesn't pay (in general) for Congress to spend time fundraising.
Also, the plan doesn't have broad support in Congress, but it is plausible; there are many in both parties who support it. Some cities and states[2] have viable parallel legislation enacted or in progress.
Obama would sign a clean CFR bill, but he almost certainly wouldn't give up the Medicaid expansion or high top-rate taxes to do it. Lessig probably would strike a deal trading away something big; specifying it as his top priority signals this.
> Even if he somehow won the election, he still would not have the power to change congress (or the Citizen's United ruling) one bit.
I've heard similar variations of this theme a lot recently, and I'm not sure I buy it. Wouldn't any victory necessarily include a major sea change in congress?
It doesn't seem likely to me that Lessig or Sanders, or <Other Non-Mainstream Candidate> would be voted in without some down ballot support finding the way in too.
> Wouldn't any victory necessarily include a major sea change in congress?
No, not really. Barack Obama's 2008 victory only came with very very very slim Democratic majorities in both houses, for instance, and then those got overturned two years later.
This myth that a presidential candidate can sweep huge Congressional majorities into office on his coattails is derived from exactly one real-life example: FDR's victory in 1932. Even Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide wasn't able to produce a Republican House of Representatives.
I agree with you it's probably not necessary. But Obama in an exceedingly bad example in that respect:
Obama is firmly in the centre of the current US political landscape. You can be a moderate Republican and be to the left of Obama on many issues. That's presumably a large part of why he won, and why so many "progressives" have been disappointed at the lack of change.
The shift from Bush to Obama was a tiny shift compared to what going from Obama to Sanders would be.
Now, I'm inclined to think this means Sanders doesn't have a chance rather than think that there'll be a massive shift in Congress, but if Sanders wins without a massive shift in Congress that would be truly bizarre indication of voters voting purely on personality rather than policy.
>The shift from Bush to Obama was a tiny shift compared to what going from Obama to Sanders would be.
Nope. The shift from Bush to Obama was immense. It resulted in two Supreme Court nominations by a Democrat instead of a Republican. What would the Obama to Sanders change be? Zero. Nothing.
The shift from Bush to Obama resulted in every Cabinet position becoming Democratic too, of course. Obama to Sanders? Basically no shift would result here; possibly a couple nominations that are slightly further leftwards.
Legislatively, what would Sanders veto that Obama hasn't? Very little.
Would Sanders have more or less luck than Obama at passing major legislation with a hostile Congress? Hard to say for sure, but I'd argue he'd have less luck, simply because he's less moderate.
You're right, of course, that Obama is a moderate, but still wrong about your overall point.
I find it absolutely crazy that you write off the change of someone who could have comfortably served in the Reagan administration (Obama) to a socialist as "zero". Yes, if that's all that happens, he'd be severely constrained.
But you appear to totally miss my point, unless I've misunderstood you:
An electorate that votes for Sanders over issues is an electorate where a majority would be fundamentally out of step with every Republican and pretty much every serving Democrat in Congress with perhaps a handful of exceptions.
The only situation where there wouldn't be massive changes in Congress over such a presidency would be if these people elect Sanders almost entirely over personality or party membership rather issues. Which is possible, but, as I said, it would be truly bizarre.
(I say this as a European well to the left of Sanders; I really hope he gets elected as it would be fantastic to see the US shift more in line with Europe, but I give him a snowballs chance in hell)
And also of every other candidate for any office within the executive branch. Those wanting to counteract Citizens United would have to run for legislative office instead. But those races have less media visibility, especially in gerrymandered safe districts or primary races against an entrenched incumbent.
People run for President of the U.S. to parlay some of their popularity or notoriety into slight changes to their party's platform, or to implicitly nominate themselves for another executive position, like vice president or cabinet member.
Lessig's actions in the past several years have been a major disappointment. I admired his work in pushing the copyright case (Eldred v. Ashcroft) all the way to the Supreme Court. Even though he lost, that at least got the issue into the media a little bit, something no one else has managed; that's something that could have been built upon.
But instead of building on that and (for example) working with tech indistries to lobby for more sensible copyright legislation, he decided to go after a far more enormous and difficult task of somehow reforming the entire election system, something which I have to wonder if he even has any particular qualifications or experience to do. Then he decided that the way to accomplish that was to run for President, which is generally taken by the media and most people who follow politics as the sign of a crank. And now that's evaporated, as one would have expected, and we're back where we started. No Presidency, certainly no election law reform, and the same old awful copyright laws getting worse all the time.
That's like pivoting from "I was unable to climb this mountain" to "I'll tear down this mountain with my bare hands." He switched from something achievable that he was qualified for to something immensely more difficult that he had no experience in. What's the result of that been?
And, you know. Even if Citizens United is overturned (hooray! It'll once again be illegal to make a movie critical of Hillary Clinton during an election! Joyous day!) Lessig's contribution to that is zero; that's going wherever it's going with or without him. It would have been better for all of us if he'd stuck with copyright where he could have made a difference.
Nothing and nobody will stop you from bringing oxygen tanks on your climb, and learning to use them is relatively straightforward. Changing the system of campaign finance in the United States, on the other hand, requires navigating dozens of immensely complex special interests, will be opposed by one or both major parties, and we haven't even gotten to what the courts might say yet. It's hard.
The Democrats plan for victory is to appear less crazy to moderate voters than the Republicans. That's their biggest advantage right now. It's why they don't like Bernie Sanders and it's why they've constricted their debate schedule so much. They want to sit on the sidelines and let the Republican candidates make fools of themselves during primary season.
Putting Lessig into the debate runs contrary to that plan. Besides, the "two polls have me at 1% and every other poll has me at 0%" argument isn't exactly a convincing case for inclusion.
Meeting the rules for inclusion that were known by all parties (and were in fact used for the first debate) should have been all that was needed for Lessig's inclusion.
This last-minute change of the rules to specifically exclude Lessig after it seemed he was going to meet the requirements is a disgrace.
We need naive people, or nothing would ever change. Maybe Lessig will be long dead before Citizens United is overturned, but his work could still pave the way for the people who overturn it.
This election cycle is making it clear that the democratic party leadership believes in "the ends justify the means". They want a democrat to win the presidency, so they don't want anyone to detract from Hillary and are making things harder for everyone else.
Wish someone here knew Larry personally. Under the constitution, there is hardly any way to accomplish his reforms. However, you can accomplish an even more revolutionary change and benefit for the American people, by slowly phasing in public polling at the federal level. This is something the executive branch is able to do under the consitution.
"The Democratic Party has required candidates receive at least 1 percent in three major national polls in the six weeks leading up to the debate in order to get a spot on the stage. But Lessig said the rules were changed last week, which would require those three polls to come prior to the six-week mark."
I'm not a citizen of the U.S. so maybe I'm missing something. Why is he not just switching to the Republican party? What's this nonsense about his ideals being more in line with the democrats? I thought the Republicans were all about the founding fathers and making sure the United States are not ruled by the old-rich?
Lessig is a member of the liberal elite. He's a Harvard professor with multiple advanced degrees, writes books and gives speeches with big words in them for academic audiences, advocates pro-consumer anti-business IP policy, and endorsed Obama.
That is emphatically not a recipe for being taken seriously by the Republican party. A successful Republican candidate is the kind of guy a redneck feels he could have a beer with, bonding over frothing hatred for Obama, who is definitely a Muslim and probably not an American. Higher education is a bed of liberal snakes, waiting to corrupt our youth and rob them of their good Christian family values. Science is to be distrusted, if not outright rejected. Job creators are the true American heroes and should be given as much power as possible and taxed as little as possible: they've earned it, through superior intellect and hard work. If anyone needs to be disenfranchised in political discourse, it's not the rich, it's the welfare queens and the unions.
You have a point: there are many similarities between Lessig's views and idealized conservatism, particularly libertarianism. But the mainstream Republican base is going to hate him personally, and after that, nothing else matters.
And yet the second place Republican candidate is an extremely well educated and successful neurosurgeon? Sounds like rednecks aren't the ones with frothing hatered
Democrats and Republicans are more similar than different. They both represent the financial elite to the detriment of those with less power. Sure, they may trade off from year to year on issues of little relevance (which party did Andrew Jackson belong to again? Abe Lincoln?), but in the end they're in lock step when it comes to who owns whom and what.
Who keeps Wall St in control of our banking regs? The popular answer is Republicans - the party of big business. The actual answer is that 4 of Hillary Clinton's top 5 all time donors are Wall St banks. In return Clinton talks tough about wall st - but only be saying we ought to "enhance" the volker rule. You can guess who will come up with that "enhancement" as well as I can. Ask a small bank what they think of Dodd-Frank (named after two Democrats, btw - and vocal "opposition" to Wall St excess). So much for the party of the little guy. You can go on and on like this for both parties. The only constant is that they support the rich.
Contrary to the other reply, the Democratic and Republican parties are extremely different. It's very unusual for someone to feel comfortable just switching from one to the other suddenly.
And don't confuse rhetoric with reality. The Republican Party is pro-business and, more importantly, anti-government - almost anarchists these days. Lessig's dreams of regulating campaign spending by corporations and the wealthy fly directly in the face of what the GOP really cares about these days.
> The Republican Party is pro-business and, more importantly, anti-government
That's the theory, but often not the practice. The Republican Party often favors bigger government, they just disagree about what to spend it on. Neither party is particularly small-government anymore.
Yeah, I can agree with that. I think it's a matter of interpretation. While they latch on to big-government things, the language is a phrasing of hostility, and the governing is borderline sabotage and hostage-taking. The shutdown crises suck.
Yeah, they sortof suck, but we're 20T in the hole and 9% of the federal budget goes to debt service. That sucks more!
When do the rabble on the right who instigate these debt showdowns get to be the righteous good guys instead of demons? Do we really need to spiral down to some catastrophe before we wake up and make a change here? It's the banksters accumulating most of the power with this debt here. I suspect the left will do the opposite of what should be done and install more growth-slowing policies and spend even more rapidly than the establishment republicans have.
Because a debt showdown would do FAR more damage to the economy than debt servicing. Default due to petulance is NOT appropriate behavior for the most important currency in the world. The showdowns aren't policy, they're grandstanding. I don't like politicians playing chicken with the global economy because they find some things distasteful. If they cared that much about debt, they could actually, you know, raise taxes.
I never know if responses like yours are the political party-line machined outrage response or what you truly believe. If you're just spouting some party line, then happily ignore the following and get back to sleep - outrage successful.
But your last sentence makes me think you actually believe, so I'm going to burn some time on you and perhaps get past the emotion here.
Like you said, just tax everyone more! A 100% tax on earnings is reasonable in some cases; Norway does it, just tax like madmen until the debt is paid.
Well, you could do that, you could even seize everyone's property to pay down the debt, (and I don't see why that isn't a reasonable proposal either.)
The problem with that plan is, even if you did those things, the growth in social security and Medicare is too fast for even asset seizure to catch. All these trust funds "running out of money" you hear about are simply the growth of those programs outstripping the IOU's owed AND the amount congress allocates extra for additional growth. You'll get to a point where the growth spirals as lives are extended, etc
Debt is the place that you can start to install some controls. That is why our media and congress always describe it as a "showdown" or "battle". The battle is quite lopsided because the vast majority of politicians in all parties don't want to touch this and hate any boat rocking, and there's a lot of lobbyists to pay back.
Can you honestly tell me what the spending priorities are for congress? There are none! Everything is important, and all budgets for every department may only grow based on their rules for baseline budgeting in the face of increasing divides between parties and people in government - in other words, the stalemate we've seen over the past 18 years results in budgets each year that are simply last year's budget + 5% with occasional huge jumps in new spending whenever a crisis arises and everyone temporarily agrees to authorize new spending.
As I said, debt is the place to begin the place to begin debate about our spending priorities. Why? Because any new debt must be _authorized_, hence voted on. It's annoying to confront tough issues! Hence all the acrimony.
Okay, so just look at your life, your security. You think the system we have here is stable? Its so fragile and full of corruption, look at what happened in 07-08 with the fraudulent loan scams the big banks were running. And congress is the flashpoint for these crises every time. So, I'm agreeing with you that there is potential for damage if we try to rein in the spending and get some priorities.
What's the alternative that you are suggesting? Don't deal with it, let the instabilities grow, and eventually have an unmanaged collapse. Do you disagree?
If one party says 2+2=4 and the other says 2+2=17, then yes, I'm spouting party line. The GOP absolutely Will. Not. Budge. on raising taxes as a revenue generator. Therefore, they are not truly serious about the deficit. They will cut spending - only in places they don't like - but they won't increase revenue. So all this stuff about the debt ceiling? That's just playing to the cheap seats. It's grandstanding, and it's irresponsible.
That said, there's nothing inherently wrong with running a deficit, as long as the debt can be serviced without breakdown (which is currently and has always been the case). Moreover, there's a strong argument that the federal government must run a deficit, for the sake of the stability of capital markets. In times of crisis, investors need to be able to shift their capital into low-risk securities, and US treasury bonds are the lowest risk reasonably liquid investment there is. Otherwise, everyone would be stuck during whatever the next crisis is, whether it's real estate or the stock market or whatever.
Social Security and Medicare are not endlessly growing monsters that engulf the universe. They represent a certain percentage of the population (retirees), and no more than that. As long as the working population can generate enough revenue to keep them going (and they can), it will work forever.
For not being a citizen you have some strong opinions about his alignment being "nonsense." Basically, republicans have utilized the increasingly deregulated campaign financing (via Super PACs) to a much later extent than Democrats. The key figure on this page[1] is on the unlimited donations category, which largely comes from the rich, old or not. I think this article[2] describing the upwards redistribution of wealth by the right might also surprise you.
EDIT: Also, even more to the point, it's been a conservative court than has unspooled campaign finance regulation to the point where Lessig felt obligated to step in.
> I'm not a citizen of the U.S. so maybe I'm missing something.
Quite a bit.
> Why is he not just switching to the Republican party? What's this nonsense about his ideals being more in line with the democrats?
The "nonsense" is the truth; there's actually considerable overlap between the positions Lessig took on issues and those taken by other notable Democrats, including Democratic candidates (most particularly, on Lessig's central issues, Sen. Sanders), with differences largely in the relative priority between issues rather than the positions on major issues. You don't see the same overlap between Lessig's positions and Republican positions (this became even more clear after he adopted a more full platform.)
> thought the Republicans were all about the founding fathers and making sure the United States are not ruled by the old-rich?
You need to look beyond the surface rhetoric at substantive policy positions to even begin to understand where the parties lie and why Lessig might feel more comfortable with the Democrats.
He was never a serious contender. His angle was as an independent agitator.
Ralph Nader was never a chance, but he changed America based on his campaign tactics (which I personally disagreed with - he split the Democratic vote).
Lessig needs a dose of 'junkyard dog'.
This setback could have been the fillip a better, more aggressive candidate would welcome.
It's a pity on how he started the campaign by saying he would resign after day 1.
Looking at the public's interest in 'outsiders' this political season (Carson, Trump, Fiorina) and the lack of any real opposition towards Hillary outside of Bernie, Lessig actually did have a chance of getting his voice heard.
I find it odd the role that would be 'secretary of technology' in the cabinet is distributed across many places. someone like Lessig would be a good fit in a role like that.
As much I see, just to few people in the world today have the interest and the capabilities to uphold the democracies of this world.
This is the plain reason, corporations and big pockets can convert the democracies of the world into support organizations for profits.
I see it in my country also. The big corporations more and more often make contracts with the government which nobody in the government understand and where in the aftermath the country was shortchanged in one or the other way and they don't come out of these contracts, where profits is guaranteed even when the people lose.
TTIP and the like are also a great, global way to destroy public control of the countries. Instead, profits will be guaranteed.
It would have been so easy for Lessig to coast on the reputation of his extraordinary work with Creative Commons [0] and his professorship at Harvard. Instead, he (IMHO correctly) identified one of the greatest challenges of our time, political corruption. His first proposed solution, the MAYDAY PACn [1] (A SuperPAC to end SuperPACs), was a brilliant idea and an abject failure. So was his second, which was this presidential campaign. It is incorrect to say that he never had a chance, since you can see how close he was in polling [2] to qualifying for the debate, and getting into the debate would have had a huge impact on awareness of his ideas and potential solutions.
I do complain that he had fallen for the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency [3], instead of understanding the complexity required for real change. But, I give him huge props for trying both of these approaches, and I can't wait to see what his third attempt to take on political corruption will be.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC [2] http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-national-d... [3] http://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5732208/the-green-lantern-theor...