Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig is running for president but he’s not doing it in the typical fashion. He’s running as a referendum candidate focused ONLY on the issue of campaign finance reform/anti-corruption. If elected, he would step down immediately upon enacting game-changing reform. Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola (Think Tank), hosts of the The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
“Larry Lessig, founder of the pro-campaign finance reform group Mayday PAC, announced in a video Tuesday he is exploring a bid centered on campaign finance and voting rights reforms — a month after he wrote a detailed memo to the Sanders campaign, explaining how to more effectively talk about getting money out of politics and making the senator’s bid more credible.
“Citizen equality can’t just be one issue on a list. It has to be the first issue — the one change that makes all other changes believable,” Lessig wrote in the memo, obtained by POLITICO. “For the first time in forever, the Wall Street Journal reports this issue is at the top of voters’ mind. You need to be the leader who makes it top of your platform as well.”*
Read more here: http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/11/913…
Comments
Gotta agree with Iadarola. This just shuts down the government. Cenk is totally wrong about Republicans suffering for it. Aside from them being basically OK with no federal government, they wouldn’t suffer politically. You can’t pin blame on them when the Democrat’s entire message is a blatant threat to shut down the government. Cenk is usually smarter than this. There does seem to be quite a bit of acquaintance bias here.
Crappy strategy aside, Lessig’s fix also fails. I’m a big proponent of proportional representation, but this version is grossly over-complicated, apparently in an attempt to preserve personality-based voting, rather than simple party voting. Voting for personalities rather than principles just produces pandering showmen politicians who don’t necessarily have any other talents. Party-based voting can allow people who do know stuff but lack theater talent to have a seat at the table. Granted, our two big parties suck, but that’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As Madison observed, parties (factions) are inevitable, and we shouldn’t waste effort fighting them when the real problem is their entrenchment, not their existence.
Lessig’s site also promotes this “Voter Empowerment Act of 2015”, which is a hot mess. Conservatives are prone to over-simplifying, but liberals are just as bad about over-complicating things. This is a failure to learn the lesson of Enron: The more complex the rules, the easier it is to game the system. I’m not quite as overwhelmed as Cenk is with Lessig’s professor-ness. There’s a reason why there’s a stereotype about ivory-tower eggheads.