Yesterday, Sam Boyd noted the possible candidacy of Lawrence Lessig for California's 12th Congressional district premised on a "Change Congress" campaign that, in addition to banning earmarks from the appropriations process, also seeks to make running for office 100% publicly financed.
What isn't spelled out in Lessig's pitch is the idea that it's not so much that big money corrupts politics -- that's nothing new -- but that it's the source of the money that's the problem. Lessig has trained his sights on the lobbyists and PACs who have undue influence over the system. His answer is public financing, but it is unclear whether he wishes to completely eliminate private, non-corporate contributions as well, which would be a considerably more ambitious goal, requiring nothing less than overruling a more than 30-year-old Supreme Court precedent.
Boyd observed that Lessig "spent ten years arguing about copyright law, didn't get anywhere, and wondered why. His conclusion was that money has too much influence in politics and so he decided to turn away from copyright work and start trying to mobilize people, mainly via the internet, to try and change things." This raises a question about Lessig himself, namely whether he's aware of the limits on activism that a House seat imposes. If anything, he would likely find himself more constrained by the institution of Congress -- the very institution he's trying to change! -- than if he continued to work as an influential private citizen. Like one of my former professors used to say, when you've got a Congress made up overwhelmingly of lawyers, lawyers who need to finance their own reelection as often as every two years, they're going to write the law in such a way that will allow them to attract big dollars while putting on airs of getting big money out of politics. There will always be a "soft money" loophole. And then a few years later there'll be some campaign finance reform huffing and puffing, and the loophole will be plugged. And then gee, what do you know! We found a new loophole for 527s! It's unclear how Lessig, a lawyer himself, will singlehandedly end the cycle of finance reform charades through his own example.
There was a smart article in Salon last year that addressed this very problem, how to create a real publicly-financed election system without trampling over the free speech rights articulated in Buckley. This seems like the sort of effort Lessig should be putting his weight behind, rather than working from within the system to remove the rot of corruption from the political process.
--Mori Dinauer
