Lawrence Lessig: The Fundraising Congress
[Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, is co-founder of the nonprofit group Change Congress.]
We are now one year into the Obama presidency, and it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed: Not because it is too conservative or too liberal, but because it is too conventional. President Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign, which promised to "fundamentally change the way Washington works."...
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Increasingly, faith in Congress has collapsed. Just 21% of Americans approve of how Congress does its job. Why? Because Congress has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The U.S. Congress has become the Fundraising Congress.
This corruption is not hidden. Consider the story Robert Kaiser tells in his fantastic book, "So Damn Much Money," about former Democratic Sen. John C. Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis, no choirboy himself, was urged to solicit campaign funds from military contractors for his 1982 reelection bid while he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "Would that be proper?" Stennis asked. "I hold life and death over those companies. I don't think it would be proper for me to take money from them."
Is such a norm even imaginable today? Compare Stennis with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who, when controlling healthcare legislation in the Senate, gladly opened his campaign chest to more than $4 million in contributions from the healthcare and insurance industries. Or Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who took millions from insurance interests and then opposed the "public option" for healthcare, despite significant support for it in their states. The list is endless; the practice open and notorious....
As someone who has known Barack Obama for almost 20 years, I would have bet my career that he understood this. If you had told me in 2008 that Obama expected to radically remake the American economy without first radically changing this corrupted machinery of government, I would not have believed it.
Yet, a year into this administration, reforming Congress is nowhere on the administration's radar....
Nor can one exaggerate the need for this reform. Our government is, as Paul Krugman put it, "ominously dysfunctional" at a time when the world desperately needs at least competence. Global warming, pandemic disease, a crashing economy -- these are not problems we can leave to distracted souls. We are at one of those rare moments when a nation must remake itself, to restore its government to its high ideals and the potential of its people.
Read entire article at LA Times
We are now one year into the Obama presidency, and it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed: Not because it is too conservative or too liberal, but because it is too conventional. President Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign, which promised to "fundamentally change the way Washington works."...
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Increasingly, faith in Congress has collapsed. Just 21% of Americans approve of how Congress does its job. Why? Because Congress has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The U.S. Congress has become the Fundraising Congress.
This corruption is not hidden. Consider the story Robert Kaiser tells in his fantastic book, "So Damn Much Money," about former Democratic Sen. John C. Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis, no choirboy himself, was urged to solicit campaign funds from military contractors for his 1982 reelection bid while he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "Would that be proper?" Stennis asked. "I hold life and death over those companies. I don't think it would be proper for me to take money from them."
Is such a norm even imaginable today? Compare Stennis with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who, when controlling healthcare legislation in the Senate, gladly opened his campaign chest to more than $4 million in contributions from the healthcare and insurance industries. Or Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who took millions from insurance interests and then opposed the "public option" for healthcare, despite significant support for it in their states. The list is endless; the practice open and notorious....
As someone who has known Barack Obama for almost 20 years, I would have bet my career that he understood this. If you had told me in 2008 that Obama expected to radically remake the American economy without first radically changing this corrupted machinery of government, I would not have believed it.
Yet, a year into this administration, reforming Congress is nowhere on the administration's radar....
Nor can one exaggerate the need for this reform. Our government is, as Paul Krugman put it, "ominously dysfunctional" at a time when the world desperately needs at least competence. Global warming, pandemic disease, a crashing economy -- these are not problems we can leave to distracted souls. We are at one of those rare moments when a nation must remake itself, to restore its government to its high ideals and the potential of its people.