4 comments

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  Adam Thierer

  1 year ago

  Tim... Agreed on all counts, and what's worse is that Lessig is proposing full-blown taxpayer financing of political campaigns on the theory that "Publicly- financed campaigns will stop the cycle of campaign finance reform loopholes and ensure that big money stays out of Congress forever." Not only will it not do so for the reasons you point out, but it will then burden us with a massively unjust electoral system that forces people to support people and causes they find offensive and idiotic.
  
  See prong #4 of the "Change Congress" plan here:
  http://change-congress.org/about
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  Sarah Davies

  1 year ago

  The problem is that if politicians are willing to be corrupted, and special interests are willing to spend resources to corrupt them, they’ll find ways to get it done.

  
  
  From what I've heard from Lessig about his change congress movement, he believes that politicians do not want to be corrupted, but are good people who find themselves in a system where corruption is necessary to keep the job. I agree that willful corruption will always find loopholes. The point of the movement, as I see it, is to create more distance between decision making and campaign financing. If politicians can opt into creating that distance, they have a concrete way to show that they are good people in a bad system.
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  Tim Lee

  1 year ago

  Sarah, that's a fair point. However, I think the same pressures now created by the campaign finance system would re-emerge in other areas. We can see, for example, how quickly McCain-Feingold was circumvented by 527s and other efforts at influencing elections without using direct contributions or soft money. We've also seen the rising importance of sophisticated get-out-the-vote efforts. It seems to me that these alternative mechanisms for affecting the outcomes of elections could lead to precisely the same kinds of pressures for corruption now created by campaign contributions.
  
  Since you work for the ACLU, it's worth noting in particular that the ACLU sided with the plaintiffs in challenging the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold. They argued, correctly in my view, that restricting third parties like the ACLU from spending money on political advocacy was a violation of the First Amendment. This is important because a system of public financing will only have the desired effects if it's coupled with a system of legal restrictions on third party expenditures on political advocacy.
  
  Which isn't to say that Lessig's project is a bad one. Certainly, a politician's promise to abstain from earmarks and PAC money and support greater transparency would make me marginally more likely to support that candidate. But these are incremental reforms, and I suspect they won't have anywhere near the impact Lessig seems to imagine.
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  Carme

  1 year ago

  Like Sarah said, it appears that Lessig is trying to widen the "mental step" of becoming corrupt. If he is right and most politicians are good people, this is a clever idea.
  
  The political system is very complex and there will always be ways for money to influence politicians, but that only strengthens Lessig's conclusion. Since the problem can't be solved completely, you might as well try a step-by-step approach trying to reach some "acceptable equilibrium".
  
  While corruption exists everywhere, there are different levels in different places and it depends a lot on the moral norms concerning what passes as corruption in each place. These norms, in turn, are greatly affected by the level of corruption currently in place. So reducing corruption even by a small amount, as Lessig proposes, might actually change the norms and induce further reductions.
  
  In such a complex system it's wiser to think up small changes, implement them, gauge their success and use that to plan ahead. Designing some over-arching solution is bound to fail, both because it's too hard to implement and because it's impossible to actually predict what its effects will be.
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