Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [56]
That scolding is fair. I can’t honestly make an argument that demands we end the corruption that is our government without honestly addressing “these data.”
The Republican senator from Oklahoma is right (not the global warming denier, Senator James Inhofe [R-Okla.; 1994–], but Coburn): There are thousands of “instances… where appropriations are leveraged for fundraising dollars or political capital.” That defines the corruption that I have described in this book. Nothing in what I will say in this chapter will undermine that claim.
And Chairman Smith is also, in part at least, right. He is right that political scientists have not shown a strong connection between contributions to political campaigns and “legislative voting patterns.” There is some contest about the question (much more than there is about global warming, I’d quibble), but it is fair to say that there is no consensus that the link has been shown.
Yet the aim of this chapter is to convince you that even if Smith is (partly) right—even if the political scientists can’t see a connection between contributions and votes—that does not exonerate Congress from the charge of corruption. Why the political scientists can’t see what the politicians do see is obvious enough, and clear. You can support the reform of Congress without denying the power of statistical regression. You can be a rootstriker even if you can’t directly see the root.
A Baseline of Independence
Though we describe our government as a “democracy,” that’s not precisely what our founders thought they had built. Indeed, for many (though not for all) at the founding, democracy was a term of derision, and the Constitution nowhere even mentions it. Instead, the Constitution speaks of a “Republic.” Article IV of the Constitution even guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of government.”
By a “Republic,” our Framers meant a “representative democracy.”3 And one critical component of that representative democracy (the House) was to be directly elected by the people. (The president and Senate were independently elected.) These elected officers were not just potted plants. They were to deliberate and decide upon what was in the public interest. The public interest: the founding generation was obsessed with the distinction between private, or special interests (what Madison called “factions”), and the public or general good. They believed there was a distinction; they believed the job of the representative was to see it, and follow it.
To the Framers, this same distinction even applied to citizens. In their view, citizenship itself was a public office. As the holder of that office, each of us is charged with voting not to advance our own private interests, but instead to advance the public’s interest. As Professor Zephyr Teachout summarizes the Framers’ view: “In the worldview of the Framers—a view that persisted in constitutional case law for at least a hundred years—citizenship is a public office…. Citizens can be corrupted and use their public offices for private gain, instead of public good. They are fundamentally responsible for the integrity of their government.”4
To modern ears, all this sounds a bit precious. What is the “public good”? And what would it mean for a citizen to vote in the public good, as opposed to in the interest of the citizen?
The answer (for us at least) is that there’s no good answer, at least not anymore. And so did the Framers come to this answer fairly soon into the life of the new republic. Fairly quickly, as they saw representative democracy develop, most of them were convinced that their