How to Get Our Democracy Back

I'm normally a fan of Lawrence Lessig but I've found his latest stuff about Congress to be a bit unfocused and unconvincing. Via Change-Congress.org he's been pushing for the Fair Elections Now Act which I do favor, strongly. But since Citizen's United he's been pushing for a constitutional convention to pass an amendment to fix things though he's been vague on what that amendment would be. I find it difficult to support something so undefined.

I saw him on Bill Moyers Journal last friday and found him just as vague. He said something like we need to give Congress the power to restore it's institutional integrity, make is so people don't perceive it as corrupt. He skipped whether it was actually corrupt or what that power would be. He was on with a libertarian from Reason and ultimately said they agreed on things but I'm pretty sure they didn't.

He did write this article in The Nation, How to Get Our Democracy Back and it's the most clear description of what he thinks must happen to make Congress a functioning organization again.

"But the problem in Washington is not lobbying. The problem is the role that lobbyists have come to play. As John Edwards used to say (when we used to quote what Edwards said), there's all the difference in the world between a lawyer making an argument to a jury and a lawyer handing out $100 bills to the jurors. That line is lost on the profession today. The profession would earn enormous credibility if it worked to restore it."

"But it is this part of the current crisis that the dark soul in me admires most. There is a brilliance to how the current fraud is sustained. Everyone inside this game recognizes that if the public saw too clearly that the driving force in Washington is campaign cash, the public might actually do something to change that. So every issue gets reframed as if it were really a question touching some deep (or not so deep) ideological question. Drug companies fund members, for example, to stop reforms that might actually test whether "me too" drugs are worth the money they cost. But the reforms get stopped by being framed as debates about "death panels" or "denying doctor choice" rather than the simple argument of cost-effectiveness that motivates the original reform. A very effective campaign succeeds in obscuring the source of conflict over major issues of reform with the pretense that it is ideology rather than campaign cash that divides us. Each of these causes is a symptom of a more fundamental disease. That disease is improper dependency. Remove the dependency, and these symptoms become--if not perfectly then at least much more--benign."