Lawrence Lessig
Washington Post: Lawrence Lessig wants to run for president — in a most unconventional way
Philip Rucker
The singular focus of Lessig’s campaign would be passing the Citizens Equality Act, a package of reforms that would guarantee the freedom to vote with automatic registration, end partisan gerrymandering and fund campaigns with a mix of small-dollar donations and public funds.
But, Lessig said, “It’s not like the one issue I care about is way off to the corner and nothing else is important to me. Everything is important to me — from Wall Street to climate change to the debt — all of those are tied to this particular problem.”
Politico: Dissent in Bernie Sanders’ camp
Tarini Parti
In an interview, Lessig said his announcement isn’t a direct result of his “set of quibbles” with the Sanders campaign. He said he mulled continuing to work with Sanders on the issue, but ultimately decided against it. “I considered continuing to try to push people inside the Sanders campaign on policy prescriptions, but it wouldn’t have changed the probability of the problem getting solved.”
Lessig added that he reached out to the Sanders campaign before releasing the video announcing his exploratory committee, but he has yet to speak to the senator. Sanders’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Lessig exploring a presidential bid.
CNN: How anti-corruption candidate could make a difference in presidential race
Lee Drutman
He intends to put the pressure on Democrats to make fundamental changes to our electoral system, most significantly on the topic of campaign finance reform, by running as a “referendum candidate.” But if he wants to make a difference in getting his agenda passed, he’s making a mistake in running as a Democrat. He should consider running as a Republican.
Lessig’s instincts about how to make a difference on a single issue are right: Because the media covers the presidential race in jarring disproportion to anything else in our politics (like, say, actual governing), a great way to get attention for an issue is to grab the megaphone that comes with running for president.
Huffington Post: Why I Want to Run
Lawrence Lessig
This is the Presidency as referendum. Our constitution, unlike some states, doesn’t give us a referendum power directly. This hack adds one in. Almost never would it be necessary — in a well-functioning democracy. But when a democracy has lost the capacity to act as a democracy, a referendum president is a peaceful means to force a change that Congress is otherwise not going to make. When the system has become the problem, we need an intervention from the outside.
We are at one of those moments now. In no plausible sense do we have a representative democracy in America today. That fact shows itself in a thousand ways — from #BlackLivesMatter to billion dollar SuperPACs, and none more profound than the deep sense that most Americans have that their government is not theirs. “The system,” as Elizabeth Warren puts it, “is rigged.” And the fundamental challenge for our democracy today is to find a way to fix that rigged system.
Free Speech
Wall Street Journal: ‘Speech Nuts’
James Taranto
“The First Amendment has something in common with the Second Amendment,” writes the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh: “Both are unusually broad legal guarantees that mark a difference between America and the rest of the world.”
Swells you up with patriotism, doesn’t it? (Or envy, if you’re from Canada, France or one of the other non-U.S. countries too numerous to mention.) But Sanneh means it as an invidious comparison. He writes: “Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of arguments, but they—we—are driven, too, by a shared sensibility that can seem irrational by European standards.”
Newsweek: Corporations Are Perverting the Notion of Free Speech
John C. Coates and Ron Fein
Many people are familiar with the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which held that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.
But the problem goes beyond election spending. Just one year after Citizens United, in a less widely reported decision, the court struck down a Vermont confidentiality law that prohibited sale of drug prescription data for marketing purposes. As the court explained, the law limited the “speech” of pharmacies and data miners that sell this data for use by pharmaceutical sales representatives.
The Atlantic: The Coddling of the American Mind
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Members of an academic community should of course be free to raise questions about Rice’s role in the Iraq War or to look skeptically at the IMF’s policies. But should dislike of part of a person’s record disqualify her altogether from sharing her perspectives?
If campus culture conveys the idea that visitors must be pure, with résumés that never offend generally left-leaning campus sensibilities, then higher education will have taken a further step toward intellectual homogeneity and the creation of an environment in which students rarely encounter diverse viewpoints. And universities will have reinforced the belief that it’s okay to filter out the positive. If students graduate believing that they can learn nothing from people they dislike or from those with whom they disagree, we will have done them a great intellectual disservice.
Independent Groups
RealClearPolitics: Perry Campaign Tests Limits of Super PAC Power
Caitlin Huey-Burns
Barbour says Perry’s camp saw the writing on the wall when the campaign reported its quarterly fundraising numbers, and knew the PAC would have to step up its game. The PAC has enough money and resources, he says, to carry Perry at least through February, when Iowa hosts the caucus, and hopes and expects the former governor to place in the top three. The PAC already has been airing ads in Iowa and is planning to release more soon.
“I think there’s a lot of money sitting on the fence in Texas, and a lot of people want to see how he does in Iowa,” Barbour says. “If we go to Iowa and finish in top three, a lot of people will come off the fence, and I think he’s really dangerous at that point.”
The role of super PACs in politics is new, but the waters have been charted. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich lasted longer than they might have with the help of wealthy donors funding their respective outside groups. This time around, the groups are more organized and critical to keeping a candidacy alive.
IRS
Washington Free Beacon: IRS Awarded One Conservative Group Tax-Exempt Status in Three-Year Period
Morgan Chalfant
The report observed that Lerner, who had knowledge of the influx of applications from conservative groups in the Spring of 2010, thereafter “failed to adequately manage” members of her staff processing the applications in question for two years.
In sum, conservative and Tea Party groups waited 621 years for the IRS to issue a decision about their tax-exempt status in the period between 2009 and 2012.
In contrast, other cases involving progressive or non-affiliated applicants prompted the IRS to act more efficiently, leading the report to conclude, “The IRS’s treatment of these organizations was almost universally consistent with Lerner’s personal political views.”
Donor Disclosure
Arizona Republic: Goldwater Institute: dark money keeps America great (No, really…)
Laurie Roberts
According to the Goldwater report, governments that try to force entities like APS to quit hiding their suspected efforts to buy themselves a set of friendly regulators via multi-million-dollar dark-money political campaigns are really trying to “silence opposing views” and “chill free speech”. Secrecy in campaign spending, it says, keeps America free of threats and intimidation.
And besides, Riches notes, it really shouldn’t matter to voters who is doing the speaking when anonymous interests flood the airwaves with ads that go largely unanswered.
Candidates and Campaigns
The Hill: Campaign Finance Reformers Finally Get The Campaign They’ve Longed For In Donald Trump
Sam Stein
“I will tell you that our system is broken,” he said at the recent GOP debate. “I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
Even for a candidate without much polish, such an admission seems overly candid. For those who warn about the pernicious flow of money into politics, however, it’s been wonderfully revealing, an actual told-ya-so moment.
“I think unlike many of the other things that Donald Trump has said, this certainly goes right to a basic truth about the political system,” said Nick Nyhart, president and CEO of the group Every Voice Center. “Essentially a private money system is built on quid pro quo politics.
The Intercept: Don’t Blame Citizens United for Donald Trump; Blame 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo Decision
Jon Schwarz
Among the ’70s-era reforms was a $50,000 per calendar year limit on how much of their own money presidential candidates could spend on their campaigns. But since Buckley it’s perfectly fine for candidates to spend as much of their own money as they want. Trump is by no means the first to take advantage of this: Ross Perot spent about $60 million of his own money in his 1992 run for president.
