Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [125]
Yet in that may lie its Achilles’ heel. For, as I’ve already remarked, the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United has been to encourage a massive growth in “independent” political expenditures—with “independent” in quotes because whether they are indeed independent or, just as important, whether they are perceived to be independent is an open question. And indeed, even with 100 percent participation in the Grant and Franklin Project, it is conceivable that these “independent” expenditures would simply evolve into another kind of dependency. Rather than obsessively focusing on how to raise campaign funds, the candidates in this new system would be obsessively focusing on how to ensure the right kind of “independent expenditures” by very powerful special interests. The candidates would smile and tell us all that their campaigns were funded by clean contributions only. And that would be true. But all the dirty work in the campaigns would be done by “Americans for a United Future” or “Veterans Against Feline Abuse” or “United We Stand Forever” or whatever. On the margin, these independent campaigns would determine who won and who lost. And as the margin is the game, this world enabled by Citizens United could well defeat all of the independence that the Grant and Franklin Project was meant to buy.
In my view, Congress should have the power to regulate against this sort of dependency as well. But if the Supreme Court sticks to its (indefensibly narrow) view of what corruption is, then even if we win this battle for funding reform, we could still lose the larger war. For the numbers here are quite staggering: Remember the $6 billion? If the Fortune 400 spent just 1 percent of their 2008 profits on “independent” political expenditures, that would be more than $6 billion. Or, put differently, just 1 percent of corporate profits could defeat the independence this system was meant to buy.
Even if this is true, however, it doesn’t change the essential first step in a strategy for reform. It may well be that we need constitutional reform to ensure congressional independence. But if we do, we need first to build a constituency for congressional independence. Right now we have no such constituency. Right now there are few clean-money candidates in Congress. And until the time that a majority of our candidates are clean, we won’t have the political strength to make that constitutional change.
So, again: I am not promising that ending the addiction brings with it an end to all the troubles that confront this democracy. I am only insisting that ending the addiction is the first step to addressing those troubles.
There are details galore to work out. There are comparisons to make and lessons to learn. But, for now, my aim is to talk strategy. If you believe, as I do, that our Congress is corrupted; if you believe that corruption can be solved only by removing its source; and if you believe that at least some version of a small-dollar campaign system is the essential first step to removing corruption at its source, how could we do it? What steps can we take? What is the strategy that makes this revolution possible?
CHAPTER 17
Strategy 1
The Conventional Game
The first steps to a cure could be made by simple statute. One vote in each House of Congress, a signature by a president, and a bill that would radically remake the economy of influence that is D.C. could be passed. No changes to the Constitution would be necessary. No insanely large commitment of funds from the Treasury required. For about the amount of money we spend every weekend at the Pentagon, we could create a workable system where “the funders” were “the People.”
The House of Representatives came close to passing such a bill in the fall of 2010: the Fair Elections Now Act. That bill would have allowed candidates to opt into a system that limited contributions to