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The thing is though, Lessig is completely right. Members of Congress spend 70% of their time raising money. They're not lawmakers, they're professional fundrais

• jacobolus 11y ago
  Okay, but so what? Lessig has no chance of winning the Democratic Party nomination, so his campaign basically amounts to hijacking the primary to promote his message. Even if that message is “completely right”, so what? You think if Lessig gets a seat at the Democratic primary debates, he’ll be able to convince the Republicans in Congress to reverse course on campaign finance? Fat chance. The most likely way to improve things at the moment is to elect another Democrat to office, and hope that Justice Scalia and/or Justice Kennedy resigns within the next few years, and the composition of the Supreme Court changes enough to reverse the Citizens United case. Also, hope that the Justice Department under a Democratic president stays aggressive about promoting voting rights around the country. Beyond that, the next big hope is getting Democrats back in control of the House of Representatives, which probably can’t happen until after the 2020 census, and only if the Democrats gain control of enough state legislatures to redraw fairer district boundaries.
  • Gotadime 11y ago
    Having a single party in total control like that would be destructive to our country, no matter how you spin it. Both parties have legitimate points and interests that need to be represented in our system. I have never understood individuals that buy in 100% to a single party and just can't fathom the idea of the opposing party having any good ideas that need to be heard. Radicalism of any kind is dangerous - conservative or liberal.
    • jacobolus 11y ago
      Campaign finance reform is dead in the water as long as the Republicans control Congress (and as long as, per Citizens United, unlimited corporate spending on political advertising is considered protected speech). So if we agree with Lessig that campaign finance reform is the most important national political priority, then electing a Democratic majority to the House is the necessary precondition. (I’m not saying you should agree with that, but it’s the premise of Lessig’s campaign.)
      • fossuser 11y ago
        Not really - The premise of Lessig's campaign is that the party in power is irrelevant, neither can do it because they're both corrupted by their need to raise funds (and notably that the people funding them are not the public). This is partly why his ideas to fix it seem drastic - there really aren't any non drastic solutions that can work. https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_... It has nothing to do with which party is in power - the affect of fundraising has corrupted the underlying incentives of the entire congress. I found his book on the topic pretty convincing: http://republic.lessig.org/ http://republic.lessig.org/
        • fossuser 11y ago
          As a follow up - I like Lessig a lot and agree with most of his ideas. The tragic thing is that politics isn't really idea driven at scale, it's more controversy and 'alpha monkey' driven. Lessig comes off as a quiet and reasonable academic - he needs somebody as his front man that can be more forceful that the media will give more attention to (though I do think his presentations are really good).
  • bsimpson 11y ago
    Isn't "fairer" roughly coterminous with "more likely to get people I like elected"? I don't trust one major political party to draw unbiased boundaries any more than I trust the other.
    • jacobolus 11y ago
      “Fairer” in this case means “composition of each state’s congressional delegation roughly represents the composition of political affiliation among the state’s citizens, and elections are reasonably competitive in areas with mixed support”. Currently, there is no question that the Republican Party has a significant structural advantage in Congress due to the gerrymandered district boundaries in states they controlled after the 2010 census. Moreover, most congressional districts are extremely safe for one party or the other, encouraging candidates to run for office on radicalized anti-compromise platforms. My personal preference would be to see districts drawn in a neutral way. The green states in this picture use an independent commission to draw districts, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Redistricting_Methods_by_State.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Redistri... It would be nice if more of the yellow states (redistricting controlled by the legislature) would switch to independent commissions.
      • humanrebar 11y ago
        I think there's no such thing as an independent commission. I'd rather it be part of the political process but improve the checks and balances somehow. Not sure what that looks like. Maybe explore special referendums or require more involvement from another branch of the government. It's also worth pointing out that the courts have actually mandated gerrymandering at times to promote majority minority districts... which actually help create supermajority caucasian districts. We would need to stop this kind of gerrymandering or somehow establish the bright line between 'beneficial' (scare quotes for skepticism, not sarcasm) gerrymandering and corrupt gerrymandering.
• enjo 11y ago
  Think of a startup whose founders spent 70% of their time raising money, they would never get anything done. That's a bad example. For even a relatively early stage startup, raising money is the actual job description for a typical startup CEO. They probably spend more than 70% of their time on it. It doesn't invalidate your point at all, however. Lawmakers are not startup CEO's. By providing every incentive to simply raise more money to ensure further employment, we've created just the worst possible system for functional government.
  • AlwaysBCoding 11y ago
    yeah like a five person team who's CEO spends 70% of time fundraising is probably fine. But an ENTIRE team that spends 70% of their time fundraising perpetually would be about as effective as Congress actually is.
    • crdoconnor 11y ago
      Congresspeople have staffers who do not fundraise.
      • WildUtah 11y ago
        "The MRA for each Representative is calculated based on three components, including personnel, which is the same for each Member ($944,671 for each Member in 2014)" "Each Member may use the MRA to employ no more than 18 permanent employees, a level that has remained unchanged for nearly four decades. A Member may employ up to four additional [part-time] employees "[0] So each congressman can hire 18 people for about a million dollars total, including both district and DC staff and not including himself. That's a good size startup. Congressmen who do spend a lot of time fundraising (not all of them -- hundreds in safe districts don't bother) are like the CEO of that office raising the money while staffers do the work at his direction. [0]http://library.clerk.house.gov/reference-files/114_20150106_Salary.pdf http://library.clerk.house.gov/reference-files/114_20150106_...
• djhn 11y ago
  > Members of Congress spend 70% of their time raising money. They're not lawmakers, they're professional fundraisers. > they would never get anything done You will have a hard time convincing HN that what US needs are more laws, especially at a rate limited by time available to politicians for writing them! Broadly speaking limits on campaign donations are fairly small (Max $5k) and average donation sums ($100-200) are extremely small. You will need anywhere from 2-8 million to run for Congress, about 25 million to run for Senate. As an entrepreneur, what do you call it when you raise capital of several million from hundreds or thousands of investors? That's right, you call it revenue, and you call those investors your customers. It's a weird model, but the US system makes a fundraising politician to personally talk to thousands and thousands of his constituents and reach out to 10-fold that figure to gauge interest. That has a significant positive side-effect of the politician being intimately familiar with their biggest concerns and often even smaller, local or personal problems that need fixing. After all, if you want to be a great salesman, you better know the customer very well.
  • AlwaysBCoding 11y ago
    The "limit" on campaign donations is a complete farce though. Let's look at Jeb Bush. Jeb stated multiple times that he wasn't running for president in 2016, and instead started a Super PAC that let him raise uncapped campaign donations, and ultimately raised over $100 million. Then he announces that he had a change of heart, was indeed going to run for president, and gave control of his Super PAC to a friend of his. And now he has $100 million to play with, fuck that $5k limit, and the voters/peasants who would donate it.
    • djhn 11y ago
      Yes, SuperPACs and presidential races are another beast altogether. Like I said, I was talking about a general case, since you referred to legislators, which by definition excludes presidential candidates. SuperPACs are difficult to play the devil's advocate for. They are a feature of running a widespread democratic campaign in a big country, where the ad impressions on voters are prohibitively expensive because of said voters purchasing power. SuperPACs have very lax limits on contribution, but they need to be firewalled from the main campaign and cannot coordinate spending, and their power to target their spending is very limited. As far as I can tell, this firewall is as good as any such structure required by law and audited (e.g. finance, consulting, etc.). That is to say, it works okay, but not great. Full disclosure, I am involved in campaigning professionally (not US) and was an independent OSCE observer of the 2012 presidential elections in the US when working for my country's parliament.
• crdoconnor 11y ago
  Any other election he'd have been right. This time there's Bernie Sanders, who is pretty much the first presidential candidate to support common sense laws. He raises money from lots of small donors with interests like you and me rather than a few big donors with interests diametrically opposed to you and me.
  • lewisl9029 11y ago
    As awesome as Sanders is, I also happen to agree with Lessig in that campaign finance reform needs to take priority over every other issue. Sanders is fighting for the right issues, but without campaign finance reform, every issue worth fighting for is going to face an almost impossible uphill battle.
    • mikegioia 11y ago
      Sanders' self-claimed biggest issue is climate change, which in my opinion trumps campaign finance reform.
      • aidos 11y ago
        I think the point is, until there's funding reform, climate reform doesn't stand much of a chance. Similarly, once the funding reform is done, climate reform will get promoted.
        • toyg 11y ago
          The problem is, everyone has his personal list of priorities topped by "something without which everything else does not make sense". * campaign reform: "how can you discuss anything when your counterpart is crooked?" * climate change: "how can you discuss anything if your house is underwater?" * fracking: "how can you discuss anything when people are causing earthquakes?" * poverty: "how can you discuss anything when people are dying of hunger?" * etc etc One should be humble enough to support the candidate that is the closest to one's personal pet argument, but who also has a chance to actually get elected. Lessig has no chance whatsoever, simple as. He wants hard to be a Nader but clearly lacks even the moderate mainstream popularity Nader had.
• jensen123 11y ago
  > Members of Congress spend 70% of their time raising money. Why do they do this? Because the politicians who spend the most money on advertising generally win the elections, right? I'm wondering if what we're seeing here is the failure of democracy with universal suffrage. Most of the voters don't seem to be independent thinkers. They could have voted for politicians who haven't been "bought". But they don't. For example, there are other political parties out there - Green Party, Libertarian Party etc., but almost nobody votes for those.
  • throwaway13337 11y ago
    This is more a problem with vote distribution. The parties outside the main two cannot win because they're always going to be a minority. If a minority could still hold a minority of the seats for getting a minority of the votes, the landscape would be vastly different. Instead, we have an average vote system based on geographic region that can only allow for major parties to hold seats. This is not the case in all democracies - most european parliaments have more than two parties because of the difference in the way minority votes are handled. This is a failure of US-flavor representative democracy.
    • jensen123 11y ago
      I suppose you have a valid point. I have one question, though: aren't political TV ads actually illegal in most European countries?
      • JetSpiegel 11y ago
        At least I never seen anything like what Jon Stewart showed. There are political TV ads during the official campaigns, but that's two weeks before the elections and it's just 1h where the ads run all in a big block.
      • toyg 11y ago
        European political campaigns are usually cheaper than US ones, but they're by no means cheap in absolute terms. We have corruption scandals here too... before '92, a lot of political parties were almost entirely funded by either the US or the USSR; they've been economically struggling ever since.
• onewaystreet 11y ago
  > This is why common sense laws that have majority support from the voters (gun control, marijuana legalization etc...) never get the traction they should. The funders don't want them, and they have the final say, not the voters. The idea that most politicians are just empty shells that do whatever their funders tell them is just wrong. The truth is that it's cheaper and much more effective for funders to give money to politicians that already support their positions. Lessig believes that if big money is taken out of politics that politicians will suddenly vote for fixing climate change, pass gun control, etc. But they wont because the ones that are against these things aren't against them because they are told to be, they are against them because they genuinely believe that they are bad policies. It's ideology, not money, that drives them.
  • icebraining 11y ago
    His political ideas have little traction because they're fallacious? I'm pretty sure that already counts as a rare achievement.
  • Riesling 11y ago
    Ok, even if this was the case, I fail to see the relevance of it? The effect would be the same. Less money for candidates that vote against fixing the climate. Hence less chances for them winning in the elections.