One Way Forward (7 page)

These three changes would radically change the economy of influence governing campaigns today. They would dramatically strengthen the independence of members from the corrupting influence of special interest money. And they would make possible again a government that people could believe in. A government that people could trust.

Others, however, believe that we need more changes than these three. There is a large and influential movement to declare that “corporations are not persons.”
⁴¹

And there are some who believe we also need to affirm that “money is not speech,” at least for purposes of campaign contributions.
⁴²
Groups such as
MovetoAmend.org
and
GetMoneyOut.org
have awakened thousands to the dangers of a government not responsive to “the People alone.” They have driven citizens to demand stronger controls on corporations.

These movements were birthed by
Citizens United.
They have joined other critical movements—for example, the Coffee Party, founded by Annabel Park as a Facebook group in response to the Tea Party, and now a broad-based and diverse movement pushing for reform. They have all done the nation an important service by raising the awareness of all of us about the distorting effect that special interest politics now has in our Republic. And if the three changes that I have described are adopted, there is no harm in at least affirming that “corporations are not persons,” in the sense that corporations are not “endowed by their Creator with [any] unalienable Rights.” God didn’t give us the Delaware corporate charter. We did.

But it is important not to let the (geeky) sexiness of a declaration that “corporations are not persons” sidetrack us from the crucial change that this Republic needs. The day before
Citizens United
was decided, this democracy was already broken.
Citizens United
may have shot it again, but the body was already cold. And reversing
Citizens United
might well be a necessary step to bringing it back to life. But such a reversal alone is nowhere close to a sufficient step. To revive this democracy, we must change the way campaigns are funded and supported.

Citizens need the courage to make this obvious point. No doubt the fight to fix this system—truly, not symbolically—will be difficult. Every pundit and purveyor of conventional wisdom will tell you it is impossible. Indeed, talk about “campaign finance reform” and their eyes roll.

But these are the same people who said that MoveOn was impossible. And that the Tea Party would flicker out. And that the Occupiers would go home after a week. They know only what they have seen. They have not seen the giant awake. It’s time to show them something new.

Whether from the Right or the Left, citizens must agree upon a common charge: that this government is corrupt, and this corruption must end.

How we end it is something that most of us should be able to agree upon as well: We end it by removing the corrupting influence of money. Not by removing all money—not by pretending that campaigns cost nothing. But by removing the sort of money that makes outsiders like us wonder whether it is money—rather than principle, or reason, or justice, or even just politics—that is buying results in our government.

But a charge and a response do not constitute a plan. To actually do something about this corruption, we need a way into the mechanisms of government. We need a strategy for taking control of those mechanisms, fixing the problem, and then getting out.

We need, in other words, a plan for taking on the most powerful government in the history of governments—and winning.

There is no simple strategy for doing this. It will instead require the actions of individuals and the actions of groups. In the section that follows, I map four things that you could do now. In the section following that, I describe what we need to be able to do—together.

The simplest and most obvious step is to hold the insiders in Congress to account. They are not evil. They are not even criminal. But they are responsible. For Congress could change this system tomorrow through legislation that would dramatically weaken the corrupting influence of money.

A single statute establishing small-dollar public funding, perfectly constitutional under the current Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, could radically change the economy of influence inside D.C. That change would then open the way to the next step of reform: a constitutional amendment, necessary to correct the mistakes of
Citizens United.
But long before any amendment, we should hold Congress responsible for failing to fix what it can on its own.

We can do this by holding every member of Congress and candidate for Congress accountable for the position that he or she takes on this question of corruption. Is he a candidate who will end the corrupting influence of money in Washington? And will he so pledge?

Imagine, then, a pledge like this:

This pledge is general. Anyone can take it—citizen or candidate alike. But on its own, the pledge is vague. So we need to add to it the ability to specify precisely what “ending the corrupting influence of money” means, by describing the mix of principles that the person taking the pledge believes essential.

Three principles could fill that commitment out. The person making the pledge could commit:

Here again, however, there are important details. There are many ways to make “public elections publicly funded.” Likewise, there are important differences in the regimes that might limit independent political expenditures and make them transparent. So, again, we need to give people a chance to specify precisely how they believe each of these principles should be respected.

TheAntiCorruptionPledge.org
gives this opportunity. Any citizens or candidate for Congress can go to this site and take the pledge.

That citizen or candidate then indicates which of the three principles he or she commits to. And for each of those principles, the citizen or candidate can select a particular plan or actual bill that would support that principle.

So, for example, under the first principle, to “provide that public elections are publicly funded,” the person taking the pledge could indicate that he or she would co-sponsor the Fair Elections Now Act, the Grant and Franklin Project that I proposed in the last chapter, or other proposals that are consistent with this principle.

Once people have made the pledge, they are given a badge they can post to their own website. If they are a candidate, their pledge is confirmed and recorded for others to see. The pledge would give us, the citizens, a clear sense of who might bring about the change we need. And it would give us a clear way to hold candidates accountable.

So here is the first thing that you should do: At the very minimum, take the pledge yourself, and then demand that candidates for Congress also take this pledge. Go to the website and check whether your congressman, or candidate for Congress in your district, is on the list. If your congressman or favorite candidate is not on the list, then demand that he or she take a stand. Now. And if he or she is, then thank that candidate for taking the first steps that we will need for reform.

Changing Congress would be a great first step. It is no doubt a necessary step. But we’ve not seen Congress take the lead on fundamental reform since Reconstruction. I don’t have high expectations that Congress will recover its capacity for leadership anytime soon.

Instead, it has been presidents who have been the engine of reform in American politics. FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan—these were the transformational figures of the last century. It thus makes sense to look to the presidency for the leadership that this movement will require.

Or maybe it did make sense, until Barack Obama showed us once again that we were Charlie Brown, and reform presidents were Lucy, pulling the football out from under us. No candidate for president in the past half-century made change as central to his campaign as Obama. Yet, once elected, his change agenda was largely forgotten. Indeed, it seems clear that Obama’s team didn’t even have a plan to carry out the changes that Obama promised. The rhetoric of that campaign was just that: rhetoric.

The 2012 cycle might, however, offer an opportunity for a reform candidate whom too few are taking seriously. For the first time in modern political history, there will be a clear path to the presidential ballot in every state that is outside the control of the Republican and Democratic parties. That path is the Internet-based “political party” Americans Elect.
⁴³

Americans Elect (AE) is the brainchild of Peter Ackerman, a director at Rockport Capital. Outraged at the cartel-like control that the two major political parties have over presidential elections, in 2007 Ackerman joined a massive effort (also massively well-funded) to establish a procedure by which candidates could become the “Americans Elect” candidate for president. And, more important, AE promised that candidate would be on every state ballot in the nation.

As this book goes to press, it seems clear that AE will succeed on both counts. An Internet-based process has been built by which citizens can become delegates to the Americans Elect Convention. That same process will enable individuals to become candidates for the AE nomination for president. And the nominee from the AE process will then, in all likelihood, be a candidate on every ballot across the nation.

When that happens, everything about the 2012 election could change. Obviously, Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee. If the Republicans nominate, as seems at least probable, Mitt Romney, then both major parties will have candidates who don’t excite the activist base. A credible third-party candidate could then radically destabilize the plans of both major-party candidates, forcing both to account for the third in a way that makes the strategy of each different.

I first met the architects of AE in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 2011. Peter and Eliot Ackerman made their pitch for this radical new experiment. I was not sold. They were both smart and impressive, but they were obsessed with the idea that the problem with American politics was the polarization of presidential candidates, not the corruption induced by campaign funding. Their hope was that some moderate, bipartisan ticket might emerge from the process they birthed. And they believe such moderates could break the stalemate that is Washington today.

I don’t believe non-moderate presidents are the problem with American politics. And I certainly don’t believe that anything would be fixed by simply adding the ability of Americans to fine-tune their choice between the two (alleged) extremes presented by the two major parties.

The original website didn’t allay these concerns. Indeed, the original AE framework didn’t even seem to recognize fundamental reform as an issue. A delegate joining AE is asked scores of questions to suss out his or her opinion on every important federal issue there is. But reform was simply folded in among every other issue. As I went through the AE interrogation, I grew increasingly impatient with the questions. I didn’t give a damn about the precise weight I gave to environmental issues versus health care issues. I cared about fixing the system first. It was like firemen asking what color I wanted my living room repainted before they put out the fire. Forget the paint. Put out the damn fire!

But AE has evolved, and the platform is primed for precisely the kind of capture that this movement requires. There is nothing in the structure of AE that commits it to substantive centrism. Indeed, the platform is open to any cross-partisan candidacy regardless of their politics. If a reform candidate could emerge within that process, the AE platform could be a crucial step toward essential reform.

What (not who) is a credible AE reform candidate?

A reform candidate makes reform of the system primary. He or she must take the corruption pledge and make it perfectly clear how the process of reform happens. There can be no ambiguity here. We can’t have another Rorschach candidate who seems to everyone to be promising just what everyone wants. Instead, this candidate must make absolutely clear that he or she is in this race because of reform first.

Obviously, reform is not the only thing a president would need to do. In
Republic, Lost,
written before AE was viable, I imagined a reform candidate who would promise a regency presidency, holding office only until the reform that he or she identified was ratified and then resigning. But whether or not that bit of drama is added to the story, there is still a need to know what this candidate believes about a host of other issues. Those questions must be answered. But to be a credible reformer, they must always be framed second. The first issue must be the issue for the campaign: How can we end the corruption of this system?

Americans Elect could be the path to this reform. If the delegates of AE rallied around a reform candidate, whether Buddy Roemer or Howard Schultz or pick-your-favorite, it would be extremely hard to keep the message of reform off the presidential debate stage. And if that message were onstage, with the two other conventional candidates—both of whom will have fed at the big-donor trough, both of whom will have taken advantage of unlimited super PAC money, and neither of whom will excite his base—then a critical dynamic could begin: Either that reform candidate would become credible enough to win; or, at least, that candidate would force the others to begin to promise the stuff that reformers demand.