January
2009
Change Congress
Lawrence Lessig is brilliant, both as a legal thinker and speaker. The Washington Post called him “the James Madison of our current day.”
Lessig has an innovative proposal for taking money out of congressional campaigning to restore trust in our government.
He writes:
1) Reformers are considering a plan by which congressional candidates who raise a threshold number of small-dollar donations would qualify for a chunk of automatic funding - several hundred thousand dollars. If they accept this funding, they couldn’t raise big-dollar donations. But they could still raise contributions up to a certain amount (such as $100 or $250), which would be matched several-times-over by the central fund, an incentive for politicians to opt into this system and focus on small-dollar givers. What do you think of this general framework?
2) Senators Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter sponsored a bipartisan bill last Congress that would make TV broadcasters pay a fee that would be the sole source of revenue for the central fund that candidates draw from. These broadcasters get access to our public airwaves for virtually free and make billions of dollars in revenue as a result. Under this scenario, no tax dollars would be used - eliminating the central talking point by reform opponents. What do you think about a fee on broadcasters to fund this reform?3) “Public financing” was the old name for this issue - which would no longer be accurate if the Durbin/Specter proposal passed. And the name’s not that good anyway. What do you think we should call this reform? Clean elections? People-powered elections? Citizen-funded elections? People-funded elections?
4) Barack Obama is on the record supporting the reform of presidential public financing. Some reformers want to pass presidential financing reform first, then pass a separate congressional bill down the road. Others want to merge the two bills and have one joint national debate. What do you think?
For the full article and a video of the amazing keynote address at Netroots Nation, click here.
Here is another fabulous talk he gave at TED on “how creativity is being strangled by the law“
dankoifman 
Politics 
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