Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [123]
Third, unlike most systems to fund publicly political campaigns, this system permits contributions in addition to the public funds. If the Obama campaign taught us anything, it taught us the importance of allowing citizens to have skin in the game. If you choose to give a candidate $100 rather than spending that money on designer jeans, that says something about your commitment to the candidate. It binds you to his campaign much more strongly than if you simply said you supported him, or allocated your (otherwise unusable) democracy vouchers to him. This is the brilliant insight in Spencer Overton’s analysis of the “Participation Interest” in campaigns.9 Give something and you get committed.
Fourth, unlike most systems to fund political campaigns publicly, this one would inject an enormous amount of money into the system. If every registered voter participated in this system, it would produce at least $6 billion in campaign funds per election cycle ($3 billion a year). Some portion of that would flow to candidates. The balance would flow to political parties. In 2010 the total amount raised and spent in all congressional elections was $1.8 billion. The total amount contributed to the two major political parties was $2.8 billion. Compare: Within a reasonable range, we can be confident the new system has a shot at being competitive with the existing one. As a candidate, you would not have to starve to be good. Or, more controversially, you could be good and still do well.
Now, put aside a million questions for the moment and focus on the single most important thing this system would buy: if a substantial number of candidates opted into this system, then no one could believe that money was buying results.
Subject to one critical assumption, which I will return to shortly, if enough representatives were elected under this system, then whenever Congress did something stupid, it would be because there were more Democrats than Republicans, or more Republicans than Democrats, or more pinheads than patriots. But whatever the reason, it would not be because of the money. No sane soul could believe that special-interest money was driving a result. Every sane soul could instead believe that the mistakes were democratic mistakes, correctable through a democratic response. This system builds a treadmill that gets politicians to worry first about what we, the voters, want. The politician gets on this treadmill the first moment she decides to run for office. From that moment until the election, she is collecting the votes (as in campaign funds) that she needs to wage an effective campaign. And on Election Day, she collects, or so she hopes, the votes she needs to win. Her primary focus is on the source of those votes: the people of her district, not the special interests.
This reform is the key to everything else that follows. Regardless of what you believe America’s most important problems are, you need to see this as the first problem that needs to be solved.
But, you say, $6 billion? That’s a lot of money, isn’t it? Can we afford it?
It is. For you and for me. For the republic, it certainly isn’t, for two reasons.
First, if it has its intended effect, this reform will make it possible for us to spend many times less than $3 billion a year. Take just one example: In 2009, the Cato Institute estimated that the U.S. Congress spent $90 billion on “corporate welfare.” Corporate welfare, as they defined it, was “subsidies and regulatory protections that lawmakers confer on certain businesses and industries.”10
We have corporate welfare largely because we have privately funded elections. The “welfare” is the payback, indirect and legal, but payback nonetheless.
So let’s imagine we could eliminate just 5 percent of that payback, by eliminating the need to pay anyone anything, since elections are no longer funded by large private contributions. Five percent of $90 billion a year is $9 billion an election cycle