Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [58]
This is the work of sophisticated constitutional architects all aimed at a single end: to establish and protect a link between Congress and “the People alone.” A link. A dependency. A dependency sufficiently strong to ensure the independence of the institution.
It might sound a bit Newspeak to describe “independence” produced by “dependence.” Yet we use the term in just this way all the time. We say we want an independent judiciary. That doesn’t mean a judiciary that can do whatever the hell it wants. It means a judiciary dependent upon the law, and not upon the president, or politics, or whatever else you think might taint a judiciary. Independence in this sense simply means the proper dependence. And for our Framers, again, the proper dependence for a Congress was “upon the People alone.”14
Of course, just because the Framers believed in something does not make it right. They (or many of them) believed in slavery. Most believed in bloodletting. They thought it absurd to imagine a woman as president.
It is fair, however, to use their ideas as the baseline against which to judge our own practices. That baseline might be unjust, no doubt. But if we believe the baseline is just, or sensible, then when there is deviation from that baseline, we should ask whether that deviation is something to praise. Does the change bring us to a better democracy? Or a better republic? Could we justify it—or even explain it—to the Framers? Or, with integrity, to ourselves?
Deviations from a Baseline
Our current Congress is far from the Congress our Framers imagined. In a million ways. It doesn’t deliberate together, as a whole. Members don’t listen to other members during debate. Each representative represents at least twenty times the number of citizens that representatives at the founding did. Almost half of the Congress returned home after each election cycle in the first century of the republic. No more than 10 percent do so today.15
But the difference I want to focus on is the economy of influence that defines the life of a member. How is the republic altered because we have allowed this dependency to evolve? How would it be different if we found a way to remove it?
We can begin to answer this question with a simple exercise: Imagine yourself in your congresswoman’s shoes. Imagine the life she leads. She has a campaign manager who tells her she needs to raise hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars, preferably long before the next election, so that no one in his right mind would even think about running against her. So each day she does her bit. A couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, on the phone with people she doesn’t know, asking for money. The routine would be comical if it weren’t so disturbing: A day on Capitol Hill is comprised of racing to vote on the floor of the House, to a quick drop in on a committee meeting, and then off to the Hill to a fund-raising office with a telephone and an operator’s headset, where, until the vote buzzer rings again, she will call and call and call again.
This life puts enormous pressure on a member. It is pressure that comes in part from the member herself (she wants to win), and in part from her staff, from her supporters, and from her party. And then she meets with a dizzying array of lobbyists, many of whom are eager to help relieve that pressure. How would that offer of “help” change what she thought, or what she did? How would it matter?
We don’t need a Sigmund Freud here. We all recognize the drive deep in our bones (or, more accurately, our DNA) to reciprocate.16 Some of it we see directly. Some of it we don’t. The subconscious is guided by interactions of reciprocity as much as the conscious. We reciprocate without thinking. We are bent to those to whom we are obliged, even when we believe, honestly, that we are not. What Robert Brooks wrote over a century ago we can repeat today: