Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [147]
I presented a draft of part of this work at the Yale Legal Theory Workshop, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Faculty Workshop.
Jef Pollock of Global Strategy Group provided survey research about attitudes toward Congress. MapLight helped frame a set of the influence data. Except where noted, Jin Suk designed the graphics that appear in the text.
None of this work would have been possible without the endless support of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and Lily Safra especially. Nor without Szelena Gray, who has lent me her enormous talent. I am endlessly grateful to her, for her, and for her work.
This book is dedicated to “the million Arnold Hiatts this revolution will need.” That includes, of course, Hiatt himself. It also includes an extraordinary collection of the believers in this cause who have taught me most everything I know about the issue and the challenge it presents: David Donnelly, Ellen Miller, Daniel Newman, Nick Nyhart, John Rauh, Micah Sifry, Josh Silver, and Daniel Weeks. I am also thankful to the amazing team that helped build Change Congress, Fix Congress First, and now Rootstrikers, including Monica Walsh, Japhet Els, Aason Swartz, Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, friends at Blue State Digital, and now Joey Mornin. I am especially grateful to the funders of those organizations, including especially Marc Andreesen, Matt and Cindy Cutts, Mike Klein, Kathleen McGrath and J. J. Abrams, David Mills, Dan Nova, Deborah Salkind, Richard Senn, Jonathan and Jennifer Soros, and the thousands of others who offered whatever they could to make change possible.
No dedication, however, could rightly acknowledge the sacrifice this work has forced on those I love most, Bettina and my three kids, Willem, Teo, and Tess. However important this issue is, it is as nothing compared to them.
Appendix
What You Can Do, Now
This is not a book about changing Congress written by a candidate for Congress. I promise (and indeed, have promised my first child if I break that promise). As I’ve described, this book is a call for a politics without politicians. That means we need a way to motivate citizens that doesn’t in the end connect to some campaign for some important national office. It needs to be about ideals, or principles, not about a person and his or her inevitable flaws.
That campaign begins by spreading a certain kind of understanding, a recognition of how a wide range of issues get affected by one common influence: campaign cash. The group I helped start, Rootstrikers.org, works to spread that recognition by asking supporters to tag stories that evince this connection, and help spread those stories to as many souls as possible.
These stories sometimes simply present themselves: journalists, encouraged in part by fantastic resources provided by groups such as OpenSecrets.org, FollowTheMoney.org, OpenCongress.org, and MapLight, are increasingly including references to the obvious issue of campaign funding as they describe almost every issue of public policy.
But the stories sometimes require people to connect the dots. Rootstrikers.org asks citizens to help others see the connection, and spread this understanding. It also asks people from many different political perspectives to contribute to this common understanding. I recognize that the issues that upset friends on the Right will upset me less, and vice versa. But if we can begin to see that there is a common root, we might begin to address that common root.
So the first most important thing that you can do is to make it a practice to point: Whenever you see a money-in-politics story, tag it on Twitter